I disagree. Idiomatic Python uses 4 spaces per indent.

Either solely use tabs or solely use spaces, they don’t work well together, at least in my experience

Mixing tabs and spaces is indeed very unwise. You can run Python with the -tt option to make sure you're consistent.

Read Style Guide for Python Code for more advice on this front

I agree ;-) The author probably refers to PEP8, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

:set tabstop=4

:set shiftwidth=4

:set expandtab

  setlocal tabstop=4
  setlocal softtabstop=4
  setlocal shiftwidth=4
  setlocal textwidth=80
  setlocal smarttab
  setlocal expandtab
  setlocal smartindent

Thanks.

It looks like ftplugin is a native vim extension - is that correct?

  filetype plugin on

Now, I am not a python programmer, but I am interested to learn more about how the structure via indentation how worked out for the language.

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 513, in __call__
      handler.post(*groups)
    File "/base/data/home/apps/reworder/1.345779356045891791/reworder.py", line 122, in post
      headers={'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}).content)
    File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/third_party/django-0.96/django/utils/simplejson/__init__.py", line 232, in loads
      return cls(encoding=encoding, **kw).decode(s)
    File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/third_party/django-0.96/django/utils/simplejson/decoder.py", line 251, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
    File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/third_party/django-0.96/django/utils/simplejson/decoder.py", line 270, in raw_decode
      raise ValueError("No JSON object could be decoded")
  ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 513, in __call__
        handler.post(*groups)
      File "/base/data/home/apps/reworder/1.345779356045891791/reworder.py", line 140, in post
        synonym = synonym_for_word(stripped_word, tag)
      File "/base/data/home/apps/reworder/1.345779356045891791/reworder.py", line 201, in synonym_for_word
        return result.get(word_type)['syn'][0]
    KeyError: 'syn'

[1] http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Did I see something strange here?

Not everybody knows that there's more to a functional language than first-class functions.

You can write code in them in a functional manner, but for anything more than toy programs you _likely_ wouldn't.

They're heavily Object-Oriented, but could probably safely be called multi-paradigm. Not just "functional", though.

Functional languages are Haskell, ML, others, where you express computation by composing functions (in the mathematical sense). You make lots of copies and you don't modify state directly like procedural and OO languages do where you modify state a lot.

  lambda x: x+1 

  def dosomething(x):
      y = x + 3 # y is a global variable
      return x + 1

The dosomething function modified `state` when it changed a global variable. Another function that modifies state is "print()". Generally any function that returns nothing is almost certainly going to modify state outside of it. (Otherwise what is the function for?)

State is memory that is not `local` to the function itself.

  def dosomething(x):
      y = x + 3 # y is a local variable
      return x + 1

There you have it.

To my understanding the issue is not whether "state" has side effects (e.g. your global vs. local example), but rather whether there is any concept of "state" (e.g. shuffling stuff from one memory slot to another).

My experience is from Prolog, where the statement "X is X + 1" results in an error, because once unified, the variable X cannot be modified - X is not a memory slot. Once you try to let go of the idea of a machine with memory slots, alternative-paradigm programming gets a little bit easier. Of course in practice state is often needed, so it often gets added through some mechanism.

My explanation is catered to people accustomed to the von Neumann architecture, however. :)

Something like:

Form: /reworder/generate

Action: Generates text, creates permalink and then redirects user to that permalink.

In the web world this pattern is common, called redirect-after-post. I'm not sure if thats much help, I've only used python in the context of the Pylons framework (and have only a few days experience with it at that). If you need more guidance let me know and I'll try and clarify.

edit: Link to redirect after post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post/Redirect/Get

edit2: I should also say this is a pretty sweet project, sorry if I just listed criticisms.

Perhaps you can explain why you believe this to be true? I thought that the strength of App Engine is that you can stay on it no matter how popular your app gets.

1. Wildcard subdomains and multi-tenancy seem to be a nice solution to "subdomains for each user".

2. Unless by "non-www. URLs" you mean naked domains, that is also possible; both explicitly defined and with wildcard subdomains.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting you though.

Congratulations!