Indentation-as-Syntax Was a Terrible Idea

The first time my code broke because of a space, I nearly threw my laptop out the window.
Not a missing semicolon. Not a misplaced bracket. Just a space. A single, invisible, smug little space.

And that’s when I realized: indentation-as-syntax wasn’t elegant. It was a trap.

The False Promise of Cleanliness

On paper, it sounds beautiful. No curly braces. No semicolons. Just pure indentation. Code that looks like poetry.

That’s what Python sold us. What Haskell flirted with. What every indentation cultist still preaches at conferences while sipping overpriced coffee.

But here’s the problem: whitespace is a lie. It’s invisible until it isn’t. It looks consistent on your editor, but messes up on your teammate’s IDE. It’s fine until your linter disagrees. It’s readable until one line uses tabs instead of spaces and suddenly your “elegant” block of code becomes a time bomb.

And let’s be honest: nobody ever wrote cleaner code because they were forced to indent. They just wasted time making their editor scream less.

The Day Tabs Betrayed Me

I once inherited a Python script that controlled a cron job for generating invoices. Simple enough…