do people really complain about significant whitespace?

[Jason]

infidel wrote:
> Where are they-who-hate-us-for-our-whitespace?  Are "they" really that
> stupid/petty?  Are "they" really out there at all?  "They" almost sound
> like a mythical caste of tasteless heathens that "we" have invented.
> It just sounds like so much trivial nitpickery that it's hard to
> believe it's as common as we've come to believe.

I have a coworker who dislikes Python for the whitespace.  He likes the
idea that if someone is silly enough to put a whole program on one
line, they can put it back together by following the braces.  He also
likes that the compiler can compile the program even if a normal person
can't read it.

I've pointed out that we format our code with the whitespace anyway.
He points out that if some code gets accidentally dedented, it is
difficult for another programmer to determine which lines were supposed
to be in the indented block.  I pointed out that if someone
accidentally moves a curly brace, the same problem can occur.
Anecdotally, I've never had either problem.

Sadly, people who do dislike the whitespace do exist.  I have also
talked with several other programmers who were very turned off about
the white-space thing and wouldn't give the language a chance.

Eric S. Raymond wrote enthusiastically about Python, but was initially
turned off by the whitespace rules.  (See
"http://www.python.org/about/success/esr/" for details.)

I personally love that my logically formatted code imparts information
logically to the language.

(I haven't seen a good hate-us-for-our-whitespace thread go on for
awhile.  I do remember some good "We like Python, Now Add Our Favorite
C/C++/LISP/INTERCAL Features or We'll Leave" threads on this newsgroup.)