Having the right to use whitespace at your own disposal is one thing and actually using it is another thing. Nothing stops you from using whitespace in these languages if it helps improve readability, and I encountered many examples in C (see Linux Kernel) and Fortran doing this. Writing f(x) in English is wrong, by the way. Check also languages like Haskell, OCaml, F#, Lisp, Closure, Forth, Elm, Standard ML, Ada, V, …etc., they do this all the time. And languages that use {..} always add space around and inside the braces; check Rust, C/C++, LaTeX, …etc. I mean, restricting something requires a strong reason because it feels bad to be punished just for adding a space after the function name. Of course f ( x ) seems ugly because the function name and arguments are short, but it feels a bit weird to disallow it.