&gt; The braces didn&#x27;t do anything for a human until indentations were added<p>Having explicit delimiters (I don&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s {}, begin...end, or whatever) provide several benefits that I have often used.<p>1. (by far the most important) They trivialize the recovery of indentation that has been trashed by a bad&#x2F;misconfigured&#x2F;unfamiliar editor or coworker who inserted &quot;\t&quot; characters into the file. Just run indent-region or send the file through indent(1).<p>2. Moving code is easier. Just kill&#x2F;yank it to where you want it and let indent-region or whatever re-indent as needed. Without delimiters I have to either re-indent manually or use an editor with a feature that changes a region&#x27;s indent level. Even with such a feature, I still have to tell the editor &quot;move this two levels deeper&quot;. With delimiters, I can leave that work to the editor.<p>3. The movement advantages you mentioned.<p>As for the extra work of having to close blocks (including the infamous LISP &quot;)))))&quot; motif), that&#x27;s what features like electric-pair-mode is for.<p>Even better, delimiters can convey more information. Color cues have proven to be very effective at conveying important information; syntax highlighting is very popular, even when showing code outside an editor (such as inside a &lt;pre&gt; tag). I find extending these color cues to also show nesting[1] to be almost as useful as basic syntax highlighting. (I&#x27;m using rainbow-delimiters[2] in that screenshot).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xS4y6rT.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xS4y6rT.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Fanael&#x2F;rainbow-delimiters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Fanael&#x2F;rainbow-delimiters</a>