PEP #99484663

[Dave Brueck]

On 10 Nov 2002, Russell Nelson wrote:

> Suggested PEP:
> 
> Treat { and } when encountered at the end of a statement like this:

Ahhh.. the old "tailor the language to people who don't even like the 
language" approach. Doesn't it seem strange to risk alienating the people 
who like and support the language to appease those that don't? When I see 
a curly brace in Python my brain says "dictionary!" and I like it that 
way. Shouldn't my opinion as a happy user of Python weigh at least as much 
as that of someone who complains about it? :)

> In this manner, people who are unable to wean themselves from silly
> syntactic block structure tokens will be happy with Python,

...until they get to the next thing they don't want to wean themselves 
from. 

You don't hear of long-time Python users complaining about the indentation
thing; it's a newbie/first impression issue. Not only do I like it as a
feature, I see it as an open-mindedness filter: people who are willing to
consider that something a little different than "normal" might be good
stick around to give Python a try, others quickly move on to something
more palatable without wasting too much of their own time (they would have
probably been unhappy with Python anyway).

-Dave