[dbcurtis]

I agree that modern tooling largely erases the tedium of getting indentation right. Whether C++ or Python, selecting a block and hitting either tab or shift-tab fixes indentation. (Which beats the heck out of re-indenting on punch cards, which I'm old enough to have used for CS homeworks...)

And, yes, it is hard to argue that presence of {} makes a language objectively more primitive, which is why I used the word "feel"... the syntactic sugar necessary to keep the block structure straight just looks like noise to me any more. But as with many things, it comes down to personal preferences.