[dwringer]

I think a lot of programmers as they are first learning their first language go through a phase of trying to count brackets and parentheses and failing miserably (those bugs are horrible to hunt down) before finding editors that help match them for you. Even then, many editors don't do a great job of this so coders develop a certain aversion to using many parentheses or brackets of any type. This is also rooted in the conventional C philosophies that more than two levels of indentation are a bad thing.

At least that was how I used to see things, prior to getting familiar with Lisp and emacs. Now I find myself using all kinds of parentheses in every language so as to make order-of-operations more explicit at a quick glance. I even learned to count parentheses and almost enjoy it.

I think learning Python's complete-opposite approach of getting rid of brackets in most cases and using indentation-only also clarified my thinking on the matter. I find that this brings back the old problem of mismatched-bracket bug hunting, but worse because indentation levels can get shifted and then there's no amount of paren-matching that will help sort things out.

In essence, I think everyone should learn Python and Lisp, then see which philosophy they like better.