My problem with this is that you have to make sure every contributor has the same editor settings. You have to also configure every editor before you can use it to write code in such a language, which is sometimes impractical.
Curly braces make this not an issue an they're visible. I don't want to depend on non-visible characters for behavior, but it's only a personal preference.
> you have to make sure every contributor has the same editor settings
You have to do that in any language. Ever worked on a C/C++ files where the indentation is different from your settings? I see only 2 choices: either you temporarily adapt your settings, or you just cringe your way through.
The third alternative (use your own settings anyway), is just lazy and mean.
> I don't want to depend on non-visible characters […]
There's an easy solution. First, either forbid or mandate tabs for indentation. Second, forbid trailing whitespace. That way all spaces will be visible.
> My problem with this is that you have to make sure every contributor has the same editor settings. You have to also configure every editor before you can use it to write code in such a language, which is sometimes impractical.
I'm not aware of ever having to do any of these things. I'm not even sure what you mean by "configure". Every editor I've installed has always done the right thing out of the box and every contributor who isn't completely incompetent has done the right thing naturally.
Compared to my experience in curly-brace languages where indentation holy wars about and it's actually painful to read code in with a brace style you're not used to - I have more respect for the wisdom embedded in Python and PEP8 daily.
Joking aside and as silly as it is to talk about "objective aesthetics" - surely you can see an argument for "less clutter == better" - as much as you've trained yourself to not see the braces, they add nothing that indentation doesn't already provide other than visual noise.
Yeah, no, I think code with braces looks better....
Objective asthetics? As far as I'm concerned, the tabs vs. spaces debate has basically proven that it doesn't exist for programming languages... (I'm rabidly pro-tabs, by the way). Maybe some of it is "trained myself not to see the braces", but it looks wrong without them.
All that aside, you just moved the argument from "My way is faster/less work" to "My way looks better", which is somewhat objective -> subjective.
"Format your code as you would have done anyway but just leave out the curly braces".
It reduces rather than increases the number of things I have to think about.