[whalesalad]

I think this is the most wonderful part of Lisp. Specifically its homoiconicity, or the fact that the syntax of the program is the program, and yet the syntax (as far as linebreaks, indentation, spaces vs tabs, etc) is completely irrelevant to the meaning of the code.

Ostensibly you could craft a future where what is on disk is not what the user is actually editing - a-la the virtual DOM. And on read/save the developer's preference is used to transform the syntax into their ideal shape. This is trivial in a Lisp, but not so easy in other languages.

[eternauta3k]

Indentation is not the reason why it's hard to autoformat Python code, or any other language for that matter.

[zem]

it's definitely a reason for python. consider:

if foo: if bar: do something else: do something else

how would you autoindent that?

[squeaky-clean]

You wouldn't, as that's not a valid python line.