[airstrike]

I used to code in Python for everything in the late aughts and loved meaningful whitespace. Whenever I used a language with braces like JavaScript, for instance, I felt like I was still indenting code meaningfully but now I had the extra hurdle of also caring about the braces. It felt unnecessary and stone-agey.

But back then I was just using vim with a nicely configured .vimrc. Linters weren't really a thing, or at least not neatly integrated into my editing experience.

Nowadays I write Rust in vscode and I love braces. Rustfmt just formats my code every time anyway, so I don't have to care about indentation and braces are placed where they should be. I spend zero time caring about code formatting, outside of configuring rustfmt.toml once per project or the occasional #[rustfmt::skip] for codeblocks which I really want to format in a specific way outside of the linter's configured rules. I also have the benefit of the compiler screaming at me if I forget a brace, pointing to the exact error including telling me when indentation is suggesting a brace is missing! :O

Moreover, I'm much more proficient in vim, and the single hotkey % is reason enough to want to favor braces. Coupled with how often I paste code into Claude, V$%,y has become muscle memory (visually select this whole line, go to the end of the line, then expand the selection to the line matching the closing delimiter under the cursor, then yank everything into the system clipboard with <leader>y)...

On occasion, I go back to Python for some side project and the whole experience feels... weird. If braces before LSPs and linters was the stone age, then Python feels like the iron age and I'm living in the future with a compiler that is incredibly talkative and helpful. I'm never going back.

[sanderjd]

I feel like your conclusion is backwards based on your argument...

> I also have the benefit of the compiler screaming at me if I forget a brace, pointing to the exact error including telling me when indentation is suggesting a brace is missing!

What the compiler is telling you here is that the braces are superfluous, because the indentation is already describing the structure correctly. So why bother?

My take is that in the (amazing!) new world with near universal usage of standardized linters, this whole debate is stale, it just doesn't matter either way. Everything is indented properly, whether or not it is necessary for correctness. So whether there is a bit of additional bracing or not, who cares?

[airstrike]

It's much easier to navigate to the end of a codeblock in the editor with vim. I can't do the same without braces. I admit this is an irrelevant argument if you're outside the vim echo chamber...but it's a pretty big echo chamber

[sanderjd]

I use vim, and yes, this is a very specific annoyance. But I just go to the beginning of the next block.

[kstrauser]

I feel the same way with my editor running Ruff on save. I still have to get the indentation right (which the editor handles for me), but that's about it. Once I hit cmd-s, everything subtly shifts to where it's supposed to be.

[maleldil]

Regarding your Claude copying flow, there's a Python-compatible alternative. In nvim, you can use treesitter selections to select a block, and treesitter is aware of the indentation.