this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Genuine question: why? What makes, say a semicolon, so superior to the the newline or tab characters?
To be clear: I don't think whitespace as a part of syntax is an awesome idea which should be more popular. It's definitely a bit more error prone in some ways. It's not perfect. But it's okay.
I've written a lot of Python and I don't think I have ever seen a syntax error caused by incorrect whitespace. I'm not exaggerating. I regularly forget semicolons in other languages but I never type out incorrectly indented code. Maybe that's just me though...
From some one who used Python as it was the easiest solution to few of my problems, and having to experience languages with brackets and/or endif/fi/done as ways to limit scope, I find that having things like brackets and/or scope terminators easier to parse and less error-prone. I'm thinking about moving on to Ruby whenever I had a need where Python would be a good choice, but the time it takes for me to understand a new language is blocking me from that.
How much of that python is written in a shared codebase with multiple active contributors? When was the last time you refactored a module?
Tabs and spaces are invisible. Semicolons are not.
A vast majority of the code in question is the code I've written for my work projects with multiple active contributors and refactoring is very common too. We all like to shit on Python for various reasons but no one in my environment ever complained about whitespace.
Like I said, I don't think whitespace is perfect as a part of syntax but I'm much more likely to forget a semicolon than a proper indentation and this applies to any language. I guess it's not universal tough, because you can often see code with messed up indentation on online forums etc. TBH this is just unthinkable to me, indentation is absolutely necessary for me to be able to read code and reason about it. When I'm thinking about blocks and scopes it's not because I counted semicolons and braces, it's 100% indentation.
I honestly think the scripting languages like fish have got it right.
Newline by default completes a line and can optionally be escaped. Saves you most of the semicolons and even implicitly highlights multi-line statements.
Whitespace doesn't matter except for separating names.
Blocks are explicitely ended without braces you can confuse with brackets or parentheses, no matter the coding style.
If Rust and fish had a baby, I think it would be the best language to have ever been created.