In Three Months of Go (from a Haskeller's perspective) (via), Michael Walker makes the following observation in passing:

I do find it a little strange that gofmt has been completely accepted, whereas Python’s significant whitespace (which is there for exactly the same reason: enforcing readable code) has been much more contentious across the programming community.

As it happens, I have a theory about this: I think it's important that gofmt only has social force. By this I mean that you can write Go code in whatever style and indentation you want, and the Go compiler will accept it (in some styles you'll have to use more semicolons than in others). This is not the case in Python, where the language itself flatly insists that you use whitespace in roughly the correct way. In Go, the only thing 'forcing' you to put your code through gofmt is the social expectations of the Go community. This is a powerful force (especially when people learning Go also learn 'run your code through gofmt '), but it is a soft force as compared to the hard force of Python's language specification, and so I think people are more accepting of it. Many of the grumpy reactions to Python's indentation rules seem to be not because the formatting it imposes is bad but because people reflexively object to being forced to do it.

(This also means that Go looks more conventional as a programming language; it has explicit block delimiters, for example. I think that people often react to languages that look weird and unconventional.)

There is an important practical side effect of this that is worth noting, which is that your pre- gofmt code can be completely sloppy. You can just slap some code into the file with terrible indentation or no indentation at all, and gofmt will fix it all up for you. This is not the case in Python; because whitespace is part of the grammar, your Python code must have good indentation from the start and cannot be fixed later. This makes it easier to write Go code (and to write it in a wide variety of editors that don't necessarily have smart indentation support and so on).

The combination of these two gives the soft force of gofmt a great deal of power over the long term. It's quite convenient to be able to scribble sloppily formatted code down and then have gofmt make it all nice for you, but if you do this you must go along with gofmt 's style choices even if you disagree with some of them. You can hold out and stick to your own style, but you're doing things the hard way as well as the socially disapproved way, and in my personal experience sooner or later it's not worth fighting Go's city hall any more. The lazy way wins out and gofmt notches up another quiet victory.