Seebs wrote:
We're fully aware of the tradeoffs of significant indentation.
You are. A couple of other people I've talked to are. Many others
are not.
The times that whitespace indentation has bitten me, it was still not
difficult to fix -- I just had to look and see which line(s)
should/should not be where they were.
Because people simply don't like it when their code's indentation doesn't
match the actual semantics, people usually manually ensure that the two
match, braces or no braces. Editors still have commands to indent and
outdent blocks of code. There is no difference between (say) C or Pascal
and Python in that regard.
Yes, there very much is.
You can't outdent "a block" in Python unless it is already correctly
indented.
I fix the block, then move it as I need to.
The underlying thing I've noticed is:
Braces have problems more often, but the problems are *always* 100%
machine-fixable and therefore trivial. It takes milliseconds to get
a program fixed so it looks like what it means.
Not so. If the braces do not match /intent/ (which is the problem I
care most about) then it cannot be fixed by machine.
Indentation has problems less often, but the problems are *never*
machine-fixable. It takes minutes or hours to figure out what was
supposed to be there.
I can see where a messed-up mail server could cause hours of grief. Not
having experienced that, but only cases where I, myself, accidently
changed indentation when I should have, it's not been a big deal to fix;
I'm willing to live with not having the machine reformat my source code
from incorrect to correct.
...
Well, seriously. If I could, I would. If it were up to me, I'd talk to the
people who'd picked Python for some stuff I have to work for, point out the
hostility of the Python community to newcomers whose workflows don't happen
to have been preemptively built entirely around Python's design decisions,
and suggest that maybe we use another language. Heck, since I've been
encouraged so much to do so, I think I will.
Your choice, obviously -- seems a shame to me, though, to give up on
Python because of one or two ouchy areas on c.l.py. By and large it's a
very helpful and courteous community.
~Ethan~
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