[jaxtellerSoA]

>3 (syntax) seems to be about not supporting the author's own highly idiosyncratic habits

Yeah, I don't get the author at all. Using indentation is so, so, so, so, much cleaner and easier to understand, even with lots of nesting than trying to figure out if you closed all the stupid curly braces, curly braces be damned.

[riskable]

I asked a "C all the things!" developer a while back why he hated Python's enforced indentation and in a whole lot of words he basically said that it makes it difficult to visually track scope when you have long chains of conditionals.

The standard Python developer response to that is, "Aha! You like braces because they enable your bad programming practices!"

However, I found the best way to illustrate that point is this: I asked him, "If you're never allowed to use a text editor/IDE that highlights braces or the space between them ever again would you still prefer braces to indentation?"

I had to re-explain this concept several times but eventually I think he understood my point at least a little bit...

"Aha! You're using spaces because Python lacks decent development tools! In fact, because there's no static typing you can't even make a decent IDE for Python! Spaces are a crutch!"

Sigh.

[ThrowawayP]

> * I asked him, "If you're never allowed to use a text editor/IDE that highlights braces or the space between them ever again would you still prefer braces to indentation?"*

Being visually impaired and also having coded since before syntax-highlighting editors became standard, yes. A brace character is something that's easy to visually perceive; whitespace isn't.

[unethical_ban]

Literally anything other than spaces that allowed easier linting, less "wait am I doing it right" regarding multi-line statements, etc.

If that is a keyword, or brackets, or whatever, I would prefer that. You can't minify or easily lint python. And you can't easily tell if there are mixed indent methods (tabs/spaces) and IDEs struggle with it vs. a simple bracket structure.

(This is a rare repost within a thread. I'm punching that card for 2018. Whitespace significance is my #1 issue with Python. I love the language, hate this feature.)

[josefx]

I hate meaningfull identation because the tools I end up using suck at maintaining it. I end up bugfixing on customer systems, sometimes on systems used by coworkers. There is no editor with consitent tab vs. spaces or tab width settings. I had editors clear two indents at once, fail to correctly line up new indents more often than not. I will accept whitespace as sane block scoping method the moment every text editor follows the same settings out of the box with the ability to customize the settings removed.

[jpindar]

>"If you're never allowed to use a text editor/IDE that highlights braces or the space between them ever again would you still prefer braces to indentation?"

Yes. (Though that's hardly the worst thing about Python.)

[pfranz]

Isn't deep nesting (hence deep indentation) a sign of code smell? Yeah, you might end up shuffling the logic into a new file or a function that makes the file much longer, but I've noticed when doing that kind of refactoring it forces you to clean up the scoping quite a bit so there's less state to keep track of.

[mixmastamyk]

Yes, we indent code for readability sake. If you don't, that would be incompetent. Which makes the braces redundant at best, noise at worst.

Their lack in Python bothered me too, one afternoon in the spring of 2001, then I moved on.

When I hear someone complaining about it I immediately think, this person hasn't much experience with Python, or is one of those highly inflexible pedant types.

[jaxtellerSoA]

>Which makes the braces redundant at best, noise at worst.

YES!! Every time I try something other than Python that requires braces, I am like "WTF, why do I have to type this extra shit! Such an annoyance."

[jboy55]

When I switched to Python, the one thing I predicted I'd hate is the forced indentation.

The reality is that after a week or so I forgot completely about it. There are other things for sure that became an issue (took awhile to fully grok class variables vs instance variables), but the indentation was never one of them.