You're mistaken if you don't think a shit ton of people dislike Python exactly because of significant white space as well as it being the source of a great many bugs.
As for Smalltalk, yes, they do like them, since faking them by passing literal hashes is a common pattern.
"""You're mistaken if you don't think a shit ton of people dislike Python exactly because of significant white space"""
Those people don't use Python anyway. There are a shit ton of people disliking anything you can think of. I don't know of many people that tried actually USING Python and still dislike the use of whitespace.
I also don't think the "whitespace haters" are intelligent about it or have any basis. For one, you should follow EXACTLY the same whitespace conventions in any bracketed language, even C. That is: you should properly indent blocks, and you should not mix spaces and tabs. If someone does not do that, I don't really think many people would like to work with his code. And if he already does that, then Python's whitespace is not any different, it just removes the brackets.
"""as well as it being the source of a great many bugs."""
I cannot think of ANY bug that can be caused by Python's use of significant whitespace. On the contrary, it prevents a lot of common bugs in bracketed languages (if/else nesting, etc).
The only think Python's use of whitespace can cause is compiler error messages (when you have messed the indentation) -- which is totally different from "bugs".
So, what bugs are you talking about? Any specific example?
"""As for Smalltalk, yes, they do like them, since faking them by passing literal hashes is a common pattern."""
Literal hashed are more like named arguments than Smalltalk selectors. For one, elements inside them are optional...
The issues around significant white space are well known and well blogged about, I'm not going to re-argue them here; google it you must, it's an old argument. If it doesn't bother you, so be it, but you're not going to sell me on it because it's crap; I can't stand Python.
If you don't think it has ever caused bugs, then you aren't thinking very hard or you've not looked into the opposing point of view at all. In any case, I'm done discussing it with you.
"""If it doesn't bother you, so be it, but you're not going to sell me on it because it's crap; I can't stand Python."""
Yeah, I thought that was your conception on the issue: i.e just blind prejudice.
"""If you don't think it has ever caused bugs, then you aren't thinking very hard or you've not looked into the opposing point of view at all. In any case, I'm done discussing it with you."""
You invoked some mysterious bugs due to Python's whitespace rules, I asked for a specific example, but conveniently "you are done discussing it".
I told you to google it because it's common, don't be an ass. Obviously I'm talking about the difficulty of sharing code and cut and paste issues between developers who have different ideas about tabs vs spaces.
It's not blind prejudice, signifigant white space is a valid reason to dislike a language; that's anything but blind. That is but one of several reasons I don't like Python, and none of them are blind. Ruby is my scripting language of choice when Bash isn't sufficient.
As for Smalltalk, yes, they do like them, since faking them by passing literal hashes is a common pattern.