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Significant whitespace is a big turn off for me too. What you gain in concision for small examples you more than lose in tooling and code manipulation.
by cageface 15y ago
Significant whitespace is a big turn off for me too. What you gain in concision for small examples you more than lose in tooling and code manipulation.
- Bodil 15y agoWhy would significant whitespace impede tooling? If the compiler can parse it, why can't your refactoring tools?
- cageface 15y agoBecause you can't automatically re-indent code. In a language like C or Javascript, I can just copy, paste and move chunks of code around and have pristine re-indentation with a keypress. In Haskell, Python, or Coffeescript I have to be very careful and have to manually re-indent if I want to move code or change scopes. Whitespace is much better left as a purely aesthetic feature, IMO.
- simpsond 15y agoI used the think the exact same thing. However, after spending some time with tools that do consider white space significant (coffeescript, haml, sass) I have come to prefer it. It's part noise reduction and part consistency between devs and environments that I prefer.
- cageface 15y agoI've been burned many, many times in python by the indentation.