Re:The Lobster Programming Language
by vidarh on Thursday April 04, 2019 @05:51AM
(#19570553)
Because it is a sufficiently divisive decision that it limits the audience. The threshold before I'd consider working with a language with significant indentation for example, is huge. And for my part at least, I've yet to see an automatic formatting tool that formats how I find things most readable.
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>Because it is a sufficiently divisive decision that it limits the audience.
Considering Python is the 2nd or 3rd top popular language in indexes like TIOBE and job entries, and within the top-5 for over a decade, that's empirically false.
It might put off some insignificant minority (that's superficial like that), but not enough people not to be hugely successful.
Given I personally is unwilling to use Python for that reason, and know other people as well, it is empirically true. We can argue over whether the number of us that refuse to use it is big enough to matter, but for my part I have no interest in the pain of dealing with that, and I have the freedom to choose it away.
Some things can be popular despite their shortcomings.
Which is neither here nor there, as the accusation I was responding to was that "it limits the audience".
Other languages can only dream to have such "limited audience" as to be ton the top-3 TIOBE...
Yes, it is directly relevant. And sure, many languages can dream of that level of use, but most other languages do not have the luxury of being there, and then making decisions that demonstrably do keep some people from using even a language as widely used as Python is worth at least thinking about. Especially when category of languages that does this is already dominated so thoroughly by Python.
Do you actually have any data on how many people don't use Python because of significant whitespace? I suspect it's actually a very vocal minority -- it's about as well-formed of a reason as refusing to use C++ because it requires semicolons.
It's a matter of personal taste, so it does not need to be "well formed". These things are more religious questions than about rational arguments. As for numbers, no, I don't. All I have to go by is the number of people I know or have met that dislike it. And so I know it is polarizing, but beyond that it is guesswork. The point was not to claim that it is some massive proportion of developers, but to point out that decisions of taste are not inconsequential.