[Goladus]

It's ironic that you say that, given that if you don't get the whitespace correct, you'll have a syntax error. That's one of the big reason Python rubs me the wrong way: white space is semantic.

Not to pile on but this is exactly backwards. The whitespace saves keystrokes and errors because it's giving a semantic meaning to something that programmers put in their code anyway.

Now that I've actually written some code in ruby, I can't comprehend how rubyists aren't driven insane by the 'end' tokens. I'm sure this is a newbie mistake but on multiple occasions I've written something like this:

    def foo(x)
      if x > 5
        puts x
      else
        puts 5
    end

    foo(7)
    foo(3)

Any experienced ruby programmers should see the error pretty quickly. But it LOOKS pretty good. Here is the error you get:

    test.rb:9: syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting kEND

What's on line 9? That's just the end of the file. Nowhere near where the syntax error actually is. In this trivial example, tab-checking the indentation using my editor will reveal the error. But this is a trivial example. In more substantial code this technique is not nearly as effective. In erb templates its harder still.

That never happened to me in python, even as a newbie. If I forget a colon I almost always know instantly because the editor will try to indent my code dramatically wrong. And if I inadvertently delete the colon at a later time without updating the indentation (this happens a lot) I get an instant syntax error that points me right at the line where the colon is missing. It's an error you can fix in your sleep. You don't forget end tokens because there are no end tokens to forget. The block ends when the indentation level decreases.