Re: Indentation with spaces

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, June 10, 2022 at 10:29 PM
> From: "Emanuel Berg" <incal@dataswamp.org>
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Indentation with spaces
>
> goncholden wrote:
>
> > Python is garbage as far as I am concerned.
>
> It doesn't look or feel cool like Lisp but development is
> super-fast. I think an experienced Lisp programmer writes the
> typical program in slightly more time than a Python
> novice does.
>
> It's the langauge itself, but also all the resources on the
> web and everywhere else including source, Q&As, books, you
> name it ... because of its popularity.
>
> I think for these and other reasons it's better than shell
> scripts (it's interactive, or can be) and it's much less of
> a learning curve (and again faster development) compared to
> Perl and other comparable languages for comparable
> applications and use cases that I know of.

Particularly at universities where the pressure is completion
of the work rather than the algorithms themselves.  At very serious
level, I prefer that a program pushes itself as far as it can,
even with errors, but completes.  That is actually a far better
design as far as languages are concerned.

The problem I see, is that many who have used python as their
first language is also their last, with some expecting their
experience should spill over to other languages.

> Lisp is cooler, looks better and might be more powerful in
> terms of the language's expressiveness, other than those things
> (which are important, no doubt) I think Python would win most
> other Progralympic disciplines vs Lisp ... TBH!

Python is slow and does not scale for large projects, so I discard
it.  I rather not see implementations in Python, except as a simple
improvement on scripting.  Although I would prefer the removal of
strict requirements.  Delving through an analysis of algorithms one
would find that grouping braces are indeed needed, as not doing so
does produce ambiguities that cannot be resolved.

With conditions, code becomes an indentation mess.  And you cannot
always split up an algorithm in situations when doing so would result
in an increase in algorithmic complexity.


> > The designers thought it would be neat to give semantic
> > meaning to whitespace. Why on earth would they give semantic
> > meaning to something that cannot be seen? Who thought that
> > was a good idea?
>
> It makes the code uniform from person to person in a way that
> makes sense (in one particular "sense", the enforced one, but
> still) - there are advantages with this both reading, writing
> and understanding - advantages related not the least to what
> I just mentioned, Python's one killer advantage, the
> development speed.

> Trust me, I wrote a Python bot which is employed as we speak
> working well and not crashing, and I did this very fast
> knowing nothing about Python and even less about IRC. It just
> happens with Python ... somehow.

That is fine.  But I get frustrated by many who use python for
whatever they do.  Have seen implementations where building
from source requires extremely experienced developers.  Because
you end up with dependencies that have no end.  See for instance
ObsPy.

I know many programming in Python that find it so enjoyable that
they feel inhibited when working with other programming frameworks.
Universities, particularly science and mathematics departments
frustrate me too much these days.


> https://dataswamp.org/~incal/#sth
>
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> underground experts united
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