[reificator]

No they'd be even more useful.

I say that from experience: when I was first learning to program I found C much easier than python for this exact reason, and I was not using syntax highlighting.

That might be because I was much more prone to nesting back then. These days I get annoyed when I have two levels of indentation inside a function and treat three as a reminder to refactor. But when I started programming I'd build pyramids 8-10 levels deep and argued with people who tried to help simplify it.

[ledauphin]

this is interesting, both because I've had a somewhat similar experience (my code is now much less indented than it was 10 years ago), and also because it does seem to hold some explanatory power for why some people seem to react so violently to Python's semantic whitespace.

I hear the argument quite frequently that semantic whitespace makes it hard to move code around (or that it causes code to get messed up in various ways) and I keep wondering why that doesn't describe my own experience as a daily user of Python. Maybe a lot of it is that I tend to avoid more than a couple of levels of indentation like the plague, and therefore it's rare for there to be any confusion about where a particular line of code would "belong".

[smaudet]

Maybe they are using some arcane programming tool from the 80s...

'{}' has the advantage that it expresses structure in a single line - copy a block of code from one place to another and your editor can throw it almost anywhere and the structure is preserved...

Modern day text editors all preserve indent wonderfully and can indent/outdent as a matter of course...but to some troll insisting on using ed or notepad or Microsoft Word I can see the difficulty.