It's easy to argue in favor of something if you can use hypotheticals that are unlikely to every come to pass. I agree with you that significant whitespace in

It's easy to argue in favor of something if you can use hypotheticals that are unlikely to every come to pass. I agree with you that significant whitespace in Python is much less of an issue than many make it out to be, but arguing that using braces (or def..end, or whatever) is a stupid idea is going a bit far in the other direction. For me, at least, my dislike of Python's significant whitespace does put a bit of weight on the scale when I choose my language. Not much, but something.