Well of course that's completely ahistorical. The motivator was eliminating block terminators. Python's predecessor, ABC, was a teaching language; programs were

Well of course that's completely ahistorical. The motivator was eliminating block terminators. Python's predecessor, ABC, was a teaching language; programs were small and refactoring was not a thing. Heck, copy-paste was hardly a thing, and there certainly were no auto formatters. Indented code was a step up from BASIC, the teaching language prevalent at the time.