The major choices that avoid braces are indentation and keywords. Indentation's upsides are less line noise. In my opion, while there's less noise, there's les

The major choices that avoid braces are indentation and keywords. Indentation's upsides are less line noise. In my opion, while there's less noise, there's less symmetry, so it's a wash on the beauty count. Indentation breaks many tools, especially the way amateur coders use them. They're frequently showing code snippets by copy-pasting into web pages that strip indentation. Notably, the standard pylint rules insist on two lines between functions and classes because the extra whitespace helps people find things. That same whitespace you get if you close a function with a single brace... Keywords are surprisingly nice. Lua does them very well: function foo() doSomeStuff end You get rid of the pointless { at function, and you have a simple "end" when you're done.