I was wrong

about syntax - semicolons and curly braces are a good idea.

I used to prefer line breaks to delimit lines of code and indentation to delimit blocks (as in Python, but without the colons, or Haskell). I've changed my mind.

Semicolons are a good idea, because logical lines of code should not be forced to be physical lines of code. It is nice to limit physical lines of code to a certain number of characters, say 80, this is useful for doing side by side diffs, etc. But often a logical line of code will be much longer than 80 chars, especially if you are using descriptive names for functions and variables, which is usually a good idea. Thus, you need to break a logical line into several physical lines, and this means you need a delimiter - enter the semicolon. Also, frankly, it is not much effort to type a semicolon, it is so far down my list of daily worries it barely registers.

My argument for curly braces over indented blocks is much more intuitive, after working on a large-ish Python project, I simply found indented blocks (for large methods/classes) too hard to read. Braced blocks are not perfect either, and can easily be abused, but the make reading easier for me. Perhaps this is just down to habit, after all, I am much more used to reading braced code, but I did a fair amount of Python programming and reading indented code never got easier.

Bonus thing I was wrong about - you will always need style guidelines, you can't hope to always codify such things in the compiler, see combining indentation with braces. But, this is something your IDE should really be doing anyway.