> Since we're in the realm of the subjective, I don't understand why you
> and others are fighting so hard against having the _option_ of
> syntactic indentation. Why are you so gung-ho on forcing your own
> subjective interpretation of the "right balance" of useless redundancy
> on everyone else?
>   
My best guess (and personal reason to be against such an option) is that 
it would add complexity to programming and maintaining Ruby code without 
actually providing new functionality (it would only add a new syntax 
option).

An additional argument could be that Ruby works based on the principle 
of least surprise (as Matz intended, please correct me if I am mistaken) 
and that having an "end" to end a block of code (or to use {}) is not 
very surprising as lots of languages work similarly.

I have not taken a look at Python myself, so I do not know how easy or 
hard it would be to program blocks of code based on identation. The idea 
does not seem very appealing to me. Even though I always take great care 
in properly identing my code, I know lots of other programmers don't and 
I would not be very happy if I had to track down their identation errors 
all over the place.