Guido van Rossum

That's pretty much all software nowadays.

Well, yeah, for bad software.

But you're in a group of people improving that recipe.

Or the mad scientist is improving the recipe that he created a year ago and making it better.

Or adding something.

He decides that he wants, I don't know, he wants some decoration on his pie or icing or whatever.

Spaces are important for readability of any kind of text.

If you take a cookbook recipe,

and you remove all the bullets and other markup, and you just crunch all the text together.

Maybe you leave the spaces between the words, but that's all you leave.

When you're in the kitchen trying to figure out, oh, what are the ingredients and what are the steps, and where does this step end and the next step begin, you're going to have a hard time if it's just one solid block of text.

Mm-hmm.

On the other hand, what a typical cookbook does, if the paper is not too expensive, each recipe starts on its own page.

Maybe there's a picture next to it.

The list of ingredients comes first.

There's a standard notation.

There's shortcuts so that you don't have to sort of write two sentences on how you have to cut the onion because there are only three ways that people ever cut onions in a kitchen, small, medium, and in slices or something like that.

Right.

None of my examples make any sense to real cooks, of course.

Because indentation, sort of taking a block of text and then having inside that block of text a smaller block of text that is indented further as sort of a group, it's like you have a bulleted list of