Late to the game here, but having just taught some Python and JavaScript to a kid, I think whitespace sensitivity is not a good choice for learning. Braces and automatic formatting is much better.

An important part of learning is to see code and just copy it (I agree with Zed Shaw's advice from Learn X The Hard Way that the transcription process alone is important to learning.) But copying whitespace is hard and error-prone. Is that one dedent or two?

The bugs from these indentation mistranscriptions are really gnarly, something happening too often (accidentally ended up in the for loop when that wasn't intended) or only once (accidentally outside). Similarly getting the indentation around conditionals leads to complex bugs.

Getting these blocks right is important enough that the belt-and-suspenders of curly braces and automatic indenting is worth it.