On 2010-11-02, Tim Harig <user...@ilthio.net> wrote: > This is Python's most noticable blemish outside of the community. > Everybody knows that Python is the language that forces you to use a > particular style of formatting; and, that is a turn-off for many people.
Honestly, I could probably live with that; the killer is the impossibility of recovering from white space damage. I have had many things happen to code over the years which required someone to run them through indent/cb. > It is a big mistake that whenever the issue arises, the community > effectively attacks anybody who might have disagreements with the tradeoffs > made for the Python language. This tends to set people on the defensive > and gives them a bad taste about the language as a whole. Yes. It does not create an impression that this is an engineering tradeoff which has been considered and understood; it creates the impression that people are defensive enough about it that they're not able to confidently acknowledge the shortcomings while maintaining that the tradeoff is worth it. I like C. If you tell me that C's macro processor sucks, I will agree with you. I don't have to make excuses or pretend that there's no downsides; I can justify my preference for the language even *granting* those downsides (and downsides aplenty are to be found). > It would be much better if the community would simply acknowledge that > this is a tradeoff the the language has made and one which is often > misunderstood by many first time Python programmers. Then it is possible > transition to Python's strengths. Don't simply ignore that there *are* > potential downfalls to this approach. Amen. I am fine with this tradeoff. It's not what I would have picked, but hey, I'm not Dutch. What I'm not fine with is people telling me that it's not a tradeoff and that all the problems are my fault. If someone designed a protocol where a particular kind of file was required to be sent via email, as plain text, with many lines starting "From ", and the protocol died horribly whenever it encountered ">From " at the beginning of a line, no amount of pointing out that the mail servers in question were wrong would make it a good design for a protocol. Whitespace damage is, indeed, wrong. It's a bad thing. It is an *extremely common* bad thing, and I fundamentally don't think it was a good choice to build a system with no redundancy against it. That "redundant" information saves our hides on a regular basis in an imperfect world. -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated! I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
