Fifth grade teacher here. Significant whitespace is a major reason I prefer Python for teaching programming.
1. I want kids to indent their code anyway; they may not realize it (or won't admit it), but this makes the code much easier for them to read. Kids will not do this unless they have to.
2. Unbalanced brackets are a major source of mistakes and confusion for my students. Relying purely on indentation resolves this problem—at the real cost of introducing indentation mistakes, but since I want kids to indent their code anyway, this is okay.
By the way, an adjacent recommendation is to configure the editor to indent with tabs instead of spaces (regardless of how you feel about tabs vs spaces in production code). Otherwise, kids will invariably end up with lines indented by 3 or 7 or some other wacky number of spaces. If possible, highlight the tabs in a different color so the kids don't use spaces by accident.
Interesting point. I wonder if "easier for them to read" is too simple. I took "read" as in "read words" or "read a book". But "reading" a program is not I think the same as reading words. Reading words could be this:
for i = 0 i < 10 i++ if i = 7 printf("hello 7") else printf("who are you");
But with a more pictorial presentation, it is easier to read the program.
for i = 0 i < 10 i++ if i = 7 printf("hello 7")
I'm just wondering - if we had a more pictograph based programming language would it be easier to understand?
This is the job of a tool like go fmt. Obviously, it’s good discipline to indent, but I wouldn’t choose this as the deciding factor for picking a first programming language.
Formatters and linters fix the mistakes made by people who know what they're doing. They do nothing to teach someone how to do something for the first time in a way that supports comprehension, only regurgitation.
go fmt can fix #1, but not #2, and won't work if #2 is causing problems.