Comment Re:Why BASIC? What for? (Score 1) 783
Indenting sub-blocks is what is proper. This is all that Python requires.
Since you've apparently never worked a real job, I'll tell you what happens in the real world as opposed to what happens in the imaginations of those who live in their moms' basements: everything works fine. And the reason that everything works fine, is that if people in the real world didn't already have this sort of thing well in hand, their Makefiles would also break and so would all of their data files. Data files for which a single missed character can be mean the difference between the rocket making its way to Mars and the rocket blowing up on the launch pad. Also, any programming language has string literals for which whitespace must be preserved properly, and if it isn't, bad things happen.
Yes, this is one perfect example of how the brain dead design decisions behind Python killed the language's shot at becoming more popular.
Would you mind telling us all just what scripting languages you think are more popular than Python?
Only PHP is, if you consider that to be a scripting language. And PHP isn't more popular than Python for any reason other than the fact that PHP is tailored to a very specific problem domain for which there is a lot of demand, and Python is not tailored for that particular domain.
All to no avail it seems, because they completely forgot to realize that some people don't like being forced into one specific way of laying out their code.
What the designers of C completely forgot to realize is that some people don't like being forced into typing lots of unnecessary "{"s and "}"s and being forced to end each line with a semicolon. It should be up to the individual programmer to make their own little design decisions, like whether their lines should end with semicolons or not.
Face it, if Python had been invented and then adopted in the '60s, and then later someone came out with a new programming language that forced you to type a lot of useless crap like "}", "{", and ";" when you didn't really have to, that person would be laughed out of the programming community. Jut look at all of the hostility for Lisp because it makes you type a few extra parentheses. How is being forced to type ";" everywhere that Lisp would make you type ")" any better than that?
It is [b]important[/b] to many people to be able to make these petty design decisions.
It's important to many people that they not have to type useless extra characters that serve no purpose except to aggravate their carpal tunnel syndrome.
This is why there are endless flame wars, or were, over different styles of source code formatting, and why it's such a contentious issue amongst passionate and independent programmers who come together to volunteer on the same project. Python's designers incorrectly concluded they could just "legislate" all this away by making it impossible to do anything other than their one way of doing things. Bzzzt....wrong.
First of all, in the real world, you don't get to make these petty design decisions. They get decided for you by the style guide that you and your coworkers use. And then when you get a different job, they use a different style guide, and it's difficult for you to read your own code, because now you're required to put all your braces in a different place from where you're used to seeing them.
Secondly, no one argues over how to indent code. They only argue about where the braces go. Since these braces are completely unnecessary -- they are only there to help the computer, so it can parse things a bit more easily; they are not there for any human purpose -- you can solve his problem of where to put the braces by completely eliminating them. You've now killed many birds with one stone: (1) You end endless pointless debate. (2) Your code looks the same at every place you work. (3) You don't have to type pointless extra characters that serve no purpose. (4) Your code is easier to read without extra noise in the code. (5) You don't have to retire early due to becoming disabled by CTS.
This is one of several reasons why Python will never become much more of a niche language than it already is.
I think you just have no clue about how popular Python actually is. I don't know of any place that doesn't use it these days. It has completely supplanted Perl in all the work places that I have seen, for instance. Python's lack of wide adoption outside of scripting is for two very important reasons: (1) It is slow for CPU-bound tasks. (2) It is dynamically typed and large projects almost always prefer statically typed languages.
That sounds to me more like the attitude of someone who is unemployed and living in their mom's basement.
Wow, you sure told me.
I sure did.
Maybe one day you'll be mature enough to have a real conversation without having to call people names.
Maybe one day you'll learn not to act like a pot calling the kettle black.
Also, for the record, I didn't insult you. I merely honestly stated what your words as posted to Slashdot sound like to me. Maybe one day you'll improve your reading comprehension.
|>ouglas