That's a stupendously anonymous appeal to authority you've made there, and it's unclear what argument you're actually saying without some explicit parenthesis around all those deeply nested phrases, or some kind of grammatical diagram.
Can you please restate how we disagree in a few simple sentences? Are there any names or links or citations or concrete examples you could add to support your argument and help us respect your authority?
Speaking of best, brightest and most informed/experienced people:
Have you ever used Dave Winer's outliner based scripting language, "Frontier"? Since the syntax of the scripting language is actually a structured outline, it's impossible to indent your code improperly. It's not that white space is significant, it's that no white space or brackets or begin/end keywords are even necessary, because your code is simply an outline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425970
After the success of MORE (an outliner and slide renderer for the Mac), he went on to develop a scripting language whose syntax itself (for both code and data) was an outline.
Kind of like Lisp with open/close triangles instead of parens!
It had one of the most comprehensive implementation of Apple Events client and server support of any Mac application, and was really useful for automating other Mac apps, earlier and in many ways better than AppleScript.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software#Frontier
http://frontier.userland.com/
Then XML came along, and he integrated support for XML into the outliner and programming language, and used Frontier to build "Aretha", "Manila", and "Radio Userland".
http://manila.userland.com/
http://radio.userland.com/
He used Frontier to build a pioneering fully programmable content management system, blogging and podcasting platform, with a dynamic HTTP server, a static HTML generator, structured XML editing, RSS publication and syndication, XML-RPC client and server, OPML import and export, and much more.
He basically invented and pioneered outliners, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, blogging and podcasting along the way.
Frontier certainly had its problems, but it was enormously successful. I think it's a good idea to learn from Dave Winer's experiences successfully designing and using practical powerful scripting languages.
Dave Winer's second outliner screencast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgUjis_fUkk
Dave Winer's the many lives of Frontier screencast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlN-L88KScw
Dave Winer on The Open Web, Blogging, Podcasting and More:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLX415mHfX0
>UserLand's first product release of April 1989 was UserLand IPC, a developer tool for interprocess communication that was intended to evolve into a cross-platform RPC tool. In January 1992 UserLand released version 1.0 of Frontier, a scripting environment for the Macintosh which included an object database and a scripting language named UserTalk. At the time of its original release, Frontier was the only system-level scripting environment for the Macintosh, but Apple was working on its own scripting language, AppleScript, and started bundling it with the MacOS 7 system software. As a consequence, most Macintosh scripting work came to be done in the less powerful, but free, scripting language provided by Apple.
>UserLand responded to Applescript by re-positioning Frontier as a Web development environment, distributing the software free of charge with the "Aretha" release of May 1995. In late 1996, Frontier 4.1 had become "an integrated development environment that lends itself to the creation and maintenance of Web sites and management of Web pages sans much busywork," and by the time Frontier 4.2 was released in January 1997, the software was firmly established in the realms of website management and CGI scripting, allowing users to "taste the power of large-scale database publishing with free software."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC