By automating the process of converting between 'indented' lisp and 'regular' lisp those that want it can have it and those that do not can simply ignore it.
True, having a round trip to Lisp's standardized format might make this usable. I have to wonder how much of Ruby's success is owed to being unable to trivially share Python code with strangers without most of our tools shredding the whitespace.
That's one of my pet peeves with python. Even sites like the django documentation suffer from this, cut&paste simply does not work in the python world and it is much poorer because of that.
It also can make debugging such a problem hell because you have to completely grok the code in order to spot the fact that the last line of a code block has somehow mysteriously jumped left 4 spaces.
Cut and paste is a good way to get the definitions from the tutorial into the interpreter without reading them.
Personally, I've only ever had a problem copy-pasting from the web. Even then, it is rare; a mild occasional annoyance well worth the price of the clutter free syntax.
There are other uses for cut/paste besides CutAndPasteProgramming; for example, one may want to post a snippet to a comment box that doesn't offer a preview function.
def foo():
if something:
do_something_else
print "bar"
http://www.genyris.com/wiki?page=default/eightqueenssource
A lot more readable than the 'regular' lisp version:
http://obereed.net/queens/algorithm.html
By automating the process of converting between 'indented' lisp and 'regular' lisp those that want it can have it and those that do not can simply ignore it.