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Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:01:44 -0400
Subject: Re: Python is readable
From: Nathan Rice <nathan.alexander.rice@gmail.com>
To: python-list@python.org
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On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Nathan Rice
> <nathan.alexander.rice@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Programming
>> language designers purposefully try to make their language C-like,
>> because not being C-like disqualifies a language from consideration
>> for a HUGE portion of programmers, who cower at the naked feeling they
>> get imagining a world without curly braces.  Fear of change and the
>> unknown are brutal, and humans are cowardly creatures that will grasp
>> at whatever excuses they can find not to acknowledge their weaknesses.
>
> Braces are clear delimiters. English doesn't have them, and suffers
> for it. (Python's indentation is, too, but English doesn't have that
> either.) It's a lot harder to mark the end of an "if" block in English
> than in pretty much any programming language.

It seems to me that Indented blocks of text are used pretty frequently
to denote definition bodies, section subordinate paragraphs and
asides.  The use of the colon seems pretty natural too.  Parentheses
are fairly natural for small asides.  The notion of character
delimiters for large sections of text is actually pretty unnatural
with the exception of  quotes.

> And be careful of what has to be given up to gain your conveniences.
> I've used languages that demand variable declarations and ones that
> don't, and I'm very much a fan of the former. There are many benefits
> to being explicit about that.

I don't like declarations, my personal preference is to have typed
signatures, and implicit declaration with type inference elsewhere.  I
view it as a matter of personal preference though, the result should
be the same, and it should be possible to view the code either way.