Why People Should Learn Python

Re:Why People Should Learn Python by pmontra on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @05:27AM (#12350747)

Agreed. That, the explicit self argument (which no other major OO language needed) and the : at the end of lines where you would need a { in other languages. If you google you find that there are good reasons for all of those choices but IMHO they are wrong solutions to the problem they solve and make Python look ugly. At least in 2016 they could make the colon optional.

The colon is so ironic for a language that takes pride in replacing braces with indentation. It's there because of readability, see https://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-are-colons-req... but so, how about an almost Erlang-like full stop?

    if condition:
      statement
      statement.

That would make semantic indentation optional, IDEs and editors know how to reindent code, spare us with bugs introduced by careless copy and paste.

Nevertheless, Python has been widely successful and it's here to stay for a long while. I hope designers will look at those bizarre features and think of better solutions for future languages. Remember that Python has its roots in the 80s. By the standards of the time it was very good. Compare it with the order of magnitudes worse design of PHP, from middle 90s, and there is a lot to forgive to Python. Maybe Guido Van Rossum would make different choices if he were to design his language now, under the influence of the languages of the last 20 years.

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Re:Why People Should Learn Python by guitarbill on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @06:32AM (#12350979)

> how about an almost Erlang-like full stop?

This is just brackets/braces in disguise, at which point you might as well follow convention and use {}.

This is obviously a very personal issue, but for me, the whitespace has less cognitive load. E.g.: in languages with brackets, people usually still indent the code for readability.

I've also found that when teaching people to program, consistency works well. I think this is one of the reasons Python is easy to pick up, just because Python code consistently looks like Python.

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Re:Why People Should Learn Python by pmontra on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @07:58AM (#12351343)

For those languages is not people who reindent code but it's the editor or the IDE. There is usually a key to force reindentation. That is possible because {} or even the end in Ruby are easy markers for the block (there are multiple markers for a block start in Ruby). Is there any automatical indentation function in some editor for Python? If not, it's Python the unfortunate language where people has to indent code to feed the compiler. I always hated doing the compiler's job.

I'm asking because I'm using Python little and only for short scripts, so I didn't bother investigating much. Still I've been bitten a couple of times by bugs introduced by moving code around and not noticing that a line was not indented correctly. That in Python and in Haml (http://haml.info/) If somebody knows about those tools I will appreciate and it will make my life easier. BTW, I'm fixing somebody's else Python scripts right now :-)

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Re:Why People Should Learn Python by squeaky-clean on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @03:43PM (#12354678)

> For those languages is not people who reindent code but it's the editor or the IDE. There is usually a key to force reindentation.

Regardless of whom or what is doing the indentation, people still prefer reading code which is indented, even in a language which relies on braces or parenthesis for flow. The indenting is not for the compiler's sake, it has no problem understanding this: http://www.ioccc.org/2014/maffiodo1/prog.c

Also people get very picky and personal when it comes to indentation in ways that a computer can't always choose. I prefer to almost always indent and format my code myself, rather than letting the editor choose. Python is the only language I actually let my editor auto-format, because of PEP-8.

> Is there any automatical indentation function in some editor for Python?

Pretty much any editor will have a feature for this, or allow you to install a popular plugin for it in less than a minute.

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Re:Why People Should Learn Python by pmontra on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @06:04PM (#12355610)

How does it know that a line pasted to the end of a block from another indentation level belongs to that block or should go after the end of the block?

    if cond:
      line
  pasted line # where does it go?

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Re:Why People Should Learn Python by CuriouslyC on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @11:03AM (#12352541)

The explicit self, while clunky at first, is clear and easy to understand. Contrast this with the fun of 'this' for bound and unbound methods in Javascript, and the mysterious extra arguments like 'arguments' that plenty of people don't even know exist.

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