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Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 16:37:10 +1000
Subject: Re: Why did Quora choose Python for its development?
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
To: python-list@python.org
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On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Octavian Rasnita <orasnita@gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
>>
>> Since indentation seems so crucial to easy comprehension of the logical
>> structure of a program,
>> making it a mandatory syntactical structure becomes a desirable feature
>> for code that must be maintained (by others, in many cases).
>
> Why "in many cases"? I wrote hundreads of programs which are working fine
> and which are maintained only by me. (But they would be very easy to
> maintain by other people if it would be necessary).
> So in that case, why to be forced to use a strict indentation?

The reason for clear code is maintenance, not maintenance-by-others.
If you come back to something in a year, you'll appreciate proper
variable names, indentation, etc.

That said, though, I still do not believe in Python's philosophy of
significant whitespace. I like to be able, if I choose, to put one
entire "logical unit" on one line, such that it can be commented out
with a single comment marker, or duplicated to another line and one
copy commented out, or whatever. To that end, I sometimes want to put
an if, its associated else, and sometimes a statement for both
branches, all in the one line. And that's not possible when whitespace
alone defines the end of an if/else block (the one-line form of a
Python 'if' can't have a non-conditional statement after it at all),
but is quite easy when things are delimited with braces.

Bug report: The "from __future__ import braces" statement isn't
working properly. Pls fix, kthxbye. :)

But I still like Python overall. There's no such thing as a perfect
language, and when it comes to syntax disagreements, I dislike
Python's significant whitespace far less than I dislike PHP's adorned
variable names. And Python, under the hood, is a very good engine for
doing what I need to do.

Chris Angelico