[earenndil]

Whatever you say must needs be parsed. And humans can parse the curly-brace style about as easily as any other semantic representation.

The advantage is transparency. I'm actually not sure if the tradeoff is worth it, if symbolic code manipulation would be better, but code as we've written it is no harder for humans to parse than would be a symbolic representation of the same. It already is a symbolic representation of itself, because humans don't see curly brace, double quote, key; humans see things in groups and clumps. Just as when you read these words I'm typing you don't see period, double space, J, u; you see 'clumps. Just'. However, what you see on your screen is exactly the file that's stored on the disc, the bytestream read by your texteditor, the bytestream read by your compiler. And that's worth something.