[MLUG - DISCUSSION] guess what

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> If you think whitespace is really a problem then obviously you've never 
> bothered using the language. Everyone, myself included, thinks 
> whitespace significance is a bad idea until they try it.

If you think that's a good idea, you've obviously never coded projects on a team
with a size greater than one, nor across spoken-language boundaries. And in Open
Source projects, in particular, you cannot mandate the IDE environment or settings.

Combine that with folks checking in various conversion factors of "X tab
characters = Y space characters" applied to your/their source code into a CVS
system and you're pretty much screwed.

But for single-developers, such as you've dealt with apparently, it doesn't
matter, since you are both the sole consumer and producer of your source code.

If significant whitespace was such a good idea, why wouldn't every language
since borrow that? It's trivial to implement. Why? Maybe because it's a bad idea
that doesn't scale.

In part that's why Java development has grown quite rapidly -- Java development
by teams scales up. 20 Java programmers can work effectively as a team. The same
can't be said of Perl, Python, PHP, etc. And that's part of the attractiveness
of Java, especially in light of outsourcing options available today.

> Again, you've obviously not used it if you think that it's really a 
> problem. 

Why do you assume this simply because I disagree with your conclusion after your
use of it? I have used it. It doesn't work in a team environment because of the
reasons I've noted.

> Yes, there are idiots that don't know how to configure their 
> editors ... but it's hardly a 
> serious problem. No worse than people in C, PHP, etc using the wrong 
> style for their braces.

Not so. Mess up the spacing in Python and the program BREAKS. Using the
wrong style for braces in a C program will still compile. And, how, exactly, do
you convince 30 or 40 developers on your Open Source project, most of whom may
not even speak English, to adhere to your personal *preferences* for whitespace
in your *personal* IDE?


> It [!@&#^$] up the code but not in anyway that 
> can't be quickly fixed by a formatting tool or better yet by removing 
> that schmucks write permissions to your CVS tree.

I see. Rejecting volunteer code because they don't like your tab settings.
That's a winner. And thank you, but I've got better things to do than fixing
up code with a formatting tool. If it could be automated, well, why isn't it
being done already in Python, then?

> PHP is easy but it's not very good at growing to large projects.

And neither is Python. In part because of the whitespace problem. That's my point.

> PHP5 
> makes some vast improvements but it's still not there. The improved OOP 
> and namespaces will make a big difference. Perl doesn't even come close 
> in the "easier" department if your talking about anything larger than a 
> short script.

Right. Perl has had namespaces since 1995. And objects. *You*'ve obviously 
never used Perl if you think that.


> >Oh, and did they ever fix the following?
> And i is undefined since you didn't declare 
> to use the global value of i or a local value of i before using it.

Why would I have to do that? NO OTHER LANGUAGE ON THE PLANET requires this.
It provides no discernable benefit to Python by being this way. It's just an
arbitrary decision by Guido, and everyone else has to pay the price.

Python still sucks.

Mike/

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