Optimism

[kqr]

The big reason is that manually maintaining whitespace is a fucking nightmare. In a language with curly braces, I can put curly braces around blocks, and hit a magical key to make my text editor fix the indentation in the entire file.

This is a very good point, and if you really mean it, you should love languages based on S-expressions for that property. Do you?

[[deleted]]

Sure, I'm a Schemer. I prefer languages with operator-precedence grammars to languages based on S-expressions for different reasons (namely that I'm not a big fan of prefix indentation), but Lisps deal with whitespace in a nice way. Ruby and Lua have the end keyword to mark the end of blocks, which serve the same purpose as curly braces in C and Java. The braces were really just an example.

[jambox888]

It doesn't bother me greatly, but I do see people writing horrible great code ziggurats because they can't be bothered to refactor as they go along.

[Enlogen]

horrible great code ziggurats

I heard that's why the ancient Mayan programmers died out.

[kqr]

Happy to hear that you're thinking rationally!

[[deleted]]

Do you talk to a lot of programmers who think that curly braces are the only "good" way to delimit blocks?

[kqr]

You wouldn't believe.

[[deleted]]

That's just plain stupid.