I was in the same camp when I had to use Python on the job, but when Scala introduced (optional) significant whitespace, I actually grew to like it a lot. I think the important difference to Python is, that with a good type system and compile time checks a whitespace error is basically always a compile time error in Scala. That's also for me it's worse in a configuration language (unless you have a schema file for validation, which is rarely the case sadly)