whitespace sensitivity is a pretty big pain to deal with in the current toolkits available for building out a programming language, unfortunately. The pain is

whitespace sensitivity is a pretty big pain to deal with in the current toolkits available for building out a programming language, unfortunately. The pain is compared to the absolute and total simplicity of defining a grammar when you're in a whitespace-insensitive setting (parser generators are easy to express and efficient in deterministic grammars). We have a lot of good parsing tools out there, but we might be missing the right tools for building out good lexers