> A couple of newlines to create a new paragraph is semantic whitespace, as one newline or a space would not do so. Markdown (although not HN's Markdownesque syntax) even has significant trailing whitespace, which I would object to in a programming language.

A code block is *not* the same as a paragraph. It is the same as a part/chapter/section/subsection/subsubsection. (Think about it.) In formal writing, these are practically always clearly indicated by not just semantic whitespace but also by semantic headers with particular semantic styling as well as semantic numbering. In addition, if you you write these programatically in for example Markdown or LaTeX, you might have semantic whitespace in the markup language but you definitely will have semantic non-whitespace symbols in the markup language.

Next Quote:

    for (i = 1; i < 11; ++i)
        printf("%d ", i);
        printf("%d ", i);

This has nothing to do with the lack of significant white space and everything to do with terrible language design. Here is the *only* valid way to write the above in Rust:

    for i in 1..11 {
        println!("{}", i);
    }
    println!("{}", i);

If you tried:

    for in in 1..11
        println!("{}", i);
        println!("{}", i);

you would get a compiler error because the braces are required around the bodies of all control- and loop structures. Also note that a common class of bugs is avoided in Rust because in Rust the loop condition is not in parenthesis. (Nor are the conditions in `if`s, etc.)

> Also, with Python appealing to new programmers, there'd probably otherwise be plenty of beginner code with no indentation at all.

Which is to say teaching methodology for coding sucks. While you shouldn't overwhelm a beginner with linting errors from a very pedantic linter (to put it mildly), not automatically linting all beginner code for some basic issues like incorrect white space and wEirD_caPS_in_OVERLY_LOOOOOOOONG_idENTIFIERS or `l` `o` `t` `s` `o2` `f` `s2` `h` `o3` `r` `t` `i` `d` `s3` (lots of short identifiers) is, IMHO, a really bad idea.

Furthermore, actually (at least in my experience tutoring C++/Java/C#), bad white space is actually not that common for beginners after the first few lessons. I guess that most humans are used to just automatically write and type semantic white space. Therefore if they see their teacher writing code with white space they'll not only use white space themselves but use it similarly.

On the other hand the identifier issues I've mentioned above are all more common, especially too short and obscure identifiers.