I think indentation is more intuitive. Even people using languages that use braces or similar usually use indentation to make code readable. If doing that you end up explaining both ideas (use braces and indent).

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Gormo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There's an important form/function distinction here, though. Indentation is useful for human readability, but braces function to give unambiguous direction to the compiler or interpreter. I think conflating these two different purposes together is a mistake: you shouldn't risk altering or breaking the logic flow of a program simply by adjusting its visual formatting.

The fact that we use whitespace for layout is precisely why it's a bad idea to assign it semantic value. I'm a fan of both braces and semicolons for that reason.

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Wowfunhappy an hour ago | parent [-]

I think this is probably correct for an experienced programmer but incorrect for someone who is new.

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Gormo 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. How would the friction inherent in conflating layout and semantics together depend on the experience level the programmer? Different programmers might have different ways of dealing with that friction, but I'd think its existence would be a property of the language itself.

	▲	Wowfunhappy 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The form/function distinction you're making requires the ability to hold two parallel representations of the same code in your head—the visual representation (what it looks like) and the syntactic representation (what it means to the parser), and to know that they're related but different. This is a higher level skill. When you're starting out, the best form to express to other humans is probably the one you're expressing to the computer. This isn't literally true—I don't think beginners should write in assembly—but it's true enough that they probably shouldn't mess with indentation beyond what would naively follow from bracket placement.

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latexr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I get why people like indentation for this. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer and it’s a matter of personal preference.

That said, my preference is curly braces (or whatever) because I’ve found indentation is often a bother. Yes, most of the time you use indentation together with braces, but not every time. There are many occasions where code is clearer without (or with custom) indentation. Furthermore, indentation-based parsing makes experimentation and finding issues more difficult. Sometimes you need to extract a small part of a larger block to bung in a REPL or something and now you’re fighting with stupid errors because of formatting, adding to the frustration.

Regarding intuitiveness, for beginners I have some doubts it makes much of a difference, and if it does I also doubt indentation wins. If you know how to write (which is a prerequisite), you know what parenthesis and quotation marks are, you understand they encapsulate something separate from the rest. Indentation is a different concept.

	▲	btreecat 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I get why people blame indentation like this. I don't think it's right or wrong to ignore the tooling that directly addresses minor issues with indentation or matching braces honestly. That said, my preference is to use the tools built into my editor and available on the CLI or web to assist and fix formatting and syntax. You get instant feedback on incorrect formatting, and I generally find that synthetic scope mistakes (regardless of method) are eliminated.