[ab5tract]

Significant whitespace is a divisive enough choice that a non-zero percentage of programmers won't even consider the language unless forced to do so by economic circumstances.

It might not be a highly visible downside, but it's there nonetheless. It's better to be honest about that than pretend there is no cultural tradeoff that comes with making such a (IMO) terrible design decision in a language.

There are plenty of people that feel the same way about sigils (like `$foo` in Perl) and semi-colons. I've never understood it -- and likely never will, at this point -- but I don't pretend that there isn't a real demographic effect that these choices bring with them.