The whole "OMG it's full of whitespace" thing kept me off Python for years, in part because I'd done a lot of work in text processing in the '90's and realized, "Whitespace is not actually evil... it is just misunderstood" was a fair encapsulation of the problem of whitespace parsing, where "equivalant" and "ignorable" whitespace were perennial problems.
Once I got over that, Python turns out to be pretty awesome, and while I still use C++ for performance-critical things and C for firmware, the clarity and simplicity of Python is unmatched by any of the other dozen-odd languages I've written in.
I agree syntactic whitespace comes with an overhead, but it's more than worth it for the other benefits you get with Python, particularly the ease of using every other library and language on the planet, from lapack to R.
Once I got over that, Python turns out to be pretty awesome, and while I still use C++ for performance-critical things and C for firmware, the clarity and simplicity of Python is unmatched by any of the other dozen-odd languages I've written in.
I agree syntactic whitespace comes with an overhead, but it's more than worth it for the other benefits you get with Python, particularly the ease of using every other library and language on the planet, from lapack to R.