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> People seem to love Python syntax. I sure don't. I'll take explicitly-delimited blocks over having to slap a ruler to my screen to know what scope I'm in an

> People seem to love Python syntax. I sure don't. I'll take explicitly-delimited blocks over having to slap a ruler to my screen to know what scope I'm in any day. It's a prime example of why form over function is a horrible tradeoff. I use Python in spite of how much I hate its syntax (and myriad other aspects of it) because it's often the path of least resistance. > ML syntax is just more regular, consistent, and typed. My sample size is "Elm and Haskell", and of that sample size, my impression is the precise opposite. I encountered enough cases of whitespace that shouldn't have mattered but does anyway that it put me entirely off both languages. Lisp? Tcl? Forth? Now those are regular and consistent (though admittedly rarely typed).

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Editor indentation guides have been a thing for a decade or two.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  That's cold comfort when I need to make some quick fix in nano or vi on some remote server somewhere.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    A practice to avoid. Cattle, not pets. Not to mention, well factored functions/methods shouldn't be so large they are hard to manage. Never had trouble with terminal editors either, but I keep things simple.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      If only all of us were so fortunate to live with you in such a utopia where servers are perfectly fungible and automation scripts are written by competent software engineers :)
      - mixmastamyk 4y ago
        Penny wise and pound foolish, your org’s decision. Currently on a project that had 12 years of tech debt. Have taken out about 60% of the garbage in three years. Indentation never a significant issue. Everything else has been.
bmitc 4y ago
Neither Elm nor Haskell are really ML-dialects though. They're more ML-adjacent. I honestly rarely have any issue with indentation in F# that isn't immediately fixable by some editor feedback. Even thinking about it, I can't think of any issues I have had at all with any consistency. I think Lisp in the flavor of Common Lisp isn't so regular or consistent, but Scheme and Forth certainly are. I basically consider ML as a typed, indentation-sensitive Scheme, at least the way I think and program in them both.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Editor indentation guides have been a thing for a decade or two.

yellowapple 4y ago
That's cold comfort when I need to make some quick fix in nano or vi on some remote server somewhere.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  A practice to avoid. Cattle, not pets. Not to mention, well factored functions/methods shouldn't be so large they are hard to manage. Never had trouble with terminal editors either, but I keep things simple.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    If only all of us were so fortunate to live with you in such a utopia where servers are perfectly fungible and automation scripts are written by competent software engineers :)
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      Penny wise and pound foolish, your org’s decision. Currently on a project that had 12 years of tech debt. Have taken out about 60% of the garbage in three years. Indentation never a significant issue. Everything else has been.

bmitc 4y ago

Neither Elm nor Haskell are really ML-dialects though. They're more ML-adjacent. I honestly rarely have any issue with indentation in F# that isn't immediately fixable by some editor feedback. Even thinking about it, I can't think of any issues I have had at all with any consistency. I think Lisp in the flavor of Common Lisp isn't so regular or consistent, but Scheme and Forth certainly are. I basically consider ML as a typed, indentation-sensitive Scheme, at least the way I think and program in them both.