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From: Robert William Fuller <hydrologiccycle@gma...>
Subject: A new language for Plan 9
Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 23:22:55 -0400

Pietro Gagliardi wrote:

<snip>

>> Put it this way: It's unwise to make program structure depend on
>> invisible characters.
> There's a language made entirely of said invisible characters, called 
> Whitespace. It's esoteric, but it works. And Python, which has the same 
> style, is a phenomenal success. Whether or not indentation works relies 
> on the programmer.

I don't use Python for this very reason.  This is probably why Ruby 
exists.  I will not use your language for the same reason.  By adopting 
such draconian white space rules you automatically alienate a large 
number of programmers.

I consider this one of the larger mistakes in programming language 
design, akin to making the period the most important token in the COBOL 
language, or using whitespace as a separator in FORTRAN (which 
incidentally lost NASA a space probe.)