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On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 11:30:33PM +1200, Apptech wrote:
> > And of course you never left the incorrectly indented code in there to
> > befuddle future maintainers.  Nah, that sort of stuff never happens.
> > Everyone is diligent and always undoes the messes they make.  Just like 
> > all
> > those people that say they will add the comments later always go back and 
> > do
> > it.
> 
> The logical implication of your riposte is that a tool should prevent you 
> doing anything, no matter how useful it may be, if what you do is in any way 
> unnacceptable in finished code. No? Do you really subscribe to that theory? 
> As an avowed disliker of 'clickety click' I'd have thought (and would hope) 
> that you'd not only tolerate but desire at least some engineering latititude 
> in your programming enviroments.

Yes, but Python makes it so easy to do mind-bending feats of logical
cleverness that I'm more than willing to accept some limitations on my
indentation. When I'm looking at someone elses code, I'm not interested
in their clever ideas about formatting, a rather boring subject, I am
interested in their clever ideas about structure, which could be
actually interesting and useful.

You're right of course, some latitude is often nice to have. But if the
lack of that latitude gives a language better survival characteristics,
by enforcing relatively easy to read code, in an open source context the
language will be more successful. For better or worse Python seemes to
be particularly successful with these survival characteristics, and
after all, most programmers are below average.

- -- 
http://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 
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