linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.
since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!
python (the language) is something i really don’t like using & almost never do when i have options, but that i still think of like a good friend that i still love & support
i’ll attend their wedding & even bring them over soup when they get sick but they made indentation-sensitive syntax what the fuck
Python forces you to make neat and tidy code, and if nothing else it means I do it by habit any time I use other programming languages
I love to tidy up my code with indentation basically all the time, but the moment you make it so i may only indent parts based on the interpreter rules and not context of what’s going on or the usage of the code, and also require arbitrary numbers of spaces rather than tab spaces which some editors might not even visually differentiate until you search/replace for them, you lose me pretty fast in practice.
I’ve found after using Python for many hundreds of hours that I don’t don’t enjoy having to take extra time moving around my text cursor to count my spaces & sacrifice legibility for complex multi-step equations, for what ultimately should just utilize readable, visible, identifiable code elements that can be identified (and if need be, counted even) by human eye to initiate with full developer intent, instead of just… exact amounts of spaces.
Funny. That exact restriction is one of the reasons I like Python above other languages. you WILL use plain and legible language. You WILL accurately portray your functions and nesting through indentation.
I can imagine that being a huge pain if you don't have a dev environment that allows you to mass format with a single hotkey though.
yeah the idea is great but it's also a language that has every feature
i think go does this way better
i think it becomes usable when u turn on pylance strict typechecking and put type hints everywhere
There's 2 things that make me not write Python anymore (despite using it personally and professionally for years).
i dont know? haskell programmer here, so im obviously biased, but i dont mind indentation-sensitive syntax. if im being honest, i do prefer brackets over indents, but i never really found it to be much of an issue. i feel like there are a quintillion other things you could (rightfully) bash python for, so it just sort of strikes me as odd that youd pick indentation-sensitivity out of... weak and inconsistent type system, indefensibly gargantuan standard library, fairly hard-line object-orientedness, etc
i dont know personally i just feel like every single python design decision is worth bullying it over except indentation-sensitive syntax, which feels like a very "nothing feature", lol
For me it’s specifically having an element with arbitrary counts change the way that code is interpreted that requires altering the way you’re even rendering your code if you happen to be untrained to spot the differences between numbers of spaces, tabs, and alternative spacing characters. It’s just silly to me to have it designed around a character that is represented specifically by the absence of visually quantifiable symbols in most IDEs, including IDLE, as opposed to something that by default you can actually see & count, and making it something you need to count.
yeah i get what you mean. thats fair. i guess for me even though ive always preferred bracket-style syntax, indent-sensitive syntax works for what python is trying to be, imo
in its early days it was treated as an educational tool and introduction to programming. but because everyone suddenly knew it, the cruel mistress of capitalism saw a business opportunity, and we've sense decided that all of our infrastructure would be built around it
i think as an educational tool, choosing to prefer indent-sensitivity over brackets makes sense from that perspective imo. not suggesting that python is a good educational tool. god no, lmao. but i think its one of the few design decisions in accordance with that line of thinking
