I also love the cleanliness of Python compared to bracketed languages.
When I was younger and learning the language it seemed to be beneficial in forcing more structure and readability in the code (no ridiculous obfuscation by single line programs).
There was an article the other day showing how to take latex math notes in neovim the other day.
They showed a plugin that displays a render of text on lines that the cursor is not on.
Perhaps there is a way to set that up for languages with brackets? Just show the brackets relevant to that line (and the closing ones perhaps)
I've been thinking a lot about that too. I wonder if we could have tools where the primary artifact is some kind of AST (a concrete syntax tree maybe?) that the tools translate into the language of the programmers choice. Seems sort of like the next step beyond bytecode. But I'm just speculating and daydreaming at this point.
I worked on that a lot (though the native format was XML, don't shoot me) ages ago and ultimately put it aside as any kind of language that is visualized from some format meant to not be read directly has to deal with the issue that you still need a canonical textual representation for communication outside of the tooling. Someone e.g. will copy and paste their esotheric view of the code into Slack or an email.
It's a complex problem. There is a lot of interesting design space to explore there, but that issue needs a solution.
It's not about what the language is fine with. It's about what the developers are fine with. And they'll never agree, so why not give them a choice with tooling?
That's what tab-loving developers are saying the whole time: tab character is that special tooling that can be set by every developer for their own environment. :)
Even though I fully buy that argument, I still prefer spaces, perhaps for the same reasons I like to format my code myself (vs. auto-formatters). Even software engineers can't be all reasonable all the time :)
Let's have it handle tabs or spaces while we're at it. The answer could always be "whatever you prefer".
My kingdom for better tooling!