Why would someone make a language where the programmer and the interpreter have two different ways of figuring out where blocks start and end?

at the closing curly?

Programmers look at the indentation.

this discussion is so dated...

llms prefer indents too

They seem to be quite okay with oneliners, have you not noticed ?

To weed out programmers who don't indent.

identation should be something the compiler does not care about

We write for humans, not for compilers.

then let humans do linting the way they like. there is not one kind of human out there.

I never understood this.

What kind of special whitespace requirements do people have?

I like significant invitation, but I still wouldn’t choose it if I was designing a language today.

Functional-style programming has become much more popular since Python was designed in the 1990s, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to have Python-like significant indentation and also support true anonymous functions.

True anonymous functions has nothing to do with indentation, ML derived languages are also indentation based.

Guido doesn't want them in the language, as simple as that.

Haskell has significant indentation and anonymous functions.

Haskell's significant indentation is, in my experience, much worse than Python's at fading into the background by matching what you would have done anyway.

As I understand it, Mojo’s goal is to be able to match state of the art performance for parallel algorithms and be able to use the exotic GPU hardware. A functional style is not necessarily productive in that context.

One interesting PL concept they implement are linear types https://mojolang.org/docs/std/traits/anytype/AnyType/

Scala 3, F#, CoffeeScript, Nim, Haskell, Elm, PureScript...

Like with array base indexes, there are plenty of languages that start with something other than zero, and many that use indentation, including a few well known in hacker circles, Python isn't alone.

It's really not that bad