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I find this amusing because I've always found "lisp has too many parenthesis" and "python has too much significant whitespace" to be roughly equivalent in terms
by j_baker 16y ago
I find this amusing because I've always found "lisp has too many parenthesis" and "python has too much significant whitespace" to be roughly equivalent in terms of relevance.
- prodigal_erik 16y agoNobody writes tools that randomly shred parentheses, but this happens all the time with whitespace. I'm halfway convinced Ruby is encroaching on Python because you can't really talk about the latter on the web without ridiculous workarounds.
- zephyrfalcon 16y agoHow so? I suppose if you paste Python code in a comment box that happens to eat whitespace, then there is a problem, yes... but for those cases there's pastebin and such. Other than that, if you're writing a blog post or article, then you can just slap the Python code in <pre> blocks, which preserves the whitespace; most "humane" text editing formats like Textile and Markdown have ways to preserve it as well.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago> comment box that happens to eat whitespace In my experience, that's easily 2/3 of the web and half of all email and IM clients. It was so bad that I was surprised when it didn't fail somehow. Pastebin is just the kind of workaround I would hate to be consigned to. Reading offline or printing becomes a huge headache because important details are constantly missing.
- jpr 16y agoOne thing that bothers me about Python's whitespace, is that it is not possible automatically indent Python code that has lost its indentation for some reason or another. You have to go back and read the original source to restore the meaning of the program even though you already have all the visible tokens it contains.