[mamon]

The one significant effect of indentation-based syntax is that it makes copy-pasting code from places like books or Stack Overflow somewhat harder and error prone. I've been hit by this few times when learning Python, I can imagine it would cause some frustration for Scala users too.

[desdiv]

Here's my straw-man proposal:

Allow both indentation-based and bracket-based syntax. Have a tool like scalafmt/goformat that freely converts between the two on a per-file and per-project basis.

When you're writing your own code, use the indentation-based syntax. You can paste in bracket-based code anywhere, hit the auto-format key on your IDE or run the commandline formatter and everything becomes nice and indentation-based.

When you're writing books, libraries, example projects, SO posts, use the bracket-based syntax. That way people who read your book/library source/example/SO post can freely copy and paste into their own projects.

This has minimal impact on bracket-based syntax diehards; everything they read and write stays the same. They won't even see the new syntax if they don't want to.

[andybak]

I hear people say this but I don't really get it.

This has been a problem for me so infrequently that I can't even recall an incident where it wasn't so trivial to fix that I did it unconsciously.

Maybe if the website/ebook has messed up formatting or you're pasting from some monstrosity of a PDF - but in the real world - not an issue.

Maybe my editor (PyCharm) is doing clever things to protect me from this - who knows...

[atemerev]

The proposal is carefully balanced to minimize this effect (unlike Python).

And copy-pasting is essential to writing code; if anybody tells you otherwise, they are lying. :)