to code or not to code?

[Nathan Saper]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000 sinck@owmyeye.ugive.com wrote:

> 
> 
> \_ I AM a newbie (just ask David), 
> 
> I'd have to reject that proposition, actually.  Beginner if you must,
> but you've done some stuff that say the kid gloves are looking kinda
> ragged.
> 
> \_ and I think Perl is still the way
> \_ to go. I have picked up books on Python (O'Reilly), and still found
> \_ myself turning to Perl because I found it easier to understand.
> 
> The thing about python that slows me down the most is that indenting
> makes a difference.  It's the whole concept that irks me.  Yes, I
> follow indenting rules, but to make the whitespace important when not
> in a string or literal?  
> 
> Many people I know have said python is happy, but I just can't see
> playing with an indent sensitive language.  It hurts.  I've got the
> ORA book, just lacking the motivation....
> 

I came to Python from C, so, at first, I hated indenting, too.  It seemed
like a waste.  However, now that I've been using it for a while, the
whitespace rules are my favorite part of the language.  They are the major
contributor to Python's extreme readability, which is great when you're
going over someone else's code.  Also, having whitespace (as opposed to
bracketing) rules is much easier to debug.  (Try searching through text to
find brackets, as opposed to just looking at the indentations, and you'll
see that the latter is much faster.)

> David
> 
> 
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> 

--

Nathan Saper
natedog@well.com
nsaper@sprintpcs.com (cell phone)
http://www.well.com/user/natedog/