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Re:Python is now the most popular introductory language at t... by __david__ on Tuesday July 08, 2014 @06:14AM (#8003764)
> This is a fundamental design flaw of Python, and it's just a Bad Idea.

That sounds like a gut reaction and not a reasoned argument. I was skeptical of it at first, but after coding some Python I decided all my reasons for hating it weren't valid. Turns out it's very practical and makes the code prettier. I don't like the language for other reasons, but the significant whitespace never gave me any problems, headaches, or weird spurious bugs.

The only negative thing about it for me was that hitting TAB in Emacs doesn't indent to the "proper" place (since it's impossible to actually determine the proper place). Instead, it would alternate amongst the valid tab points from most likely to least, which felt like a reasonable compromise to me.

Interestingly, I never hear anyone whine about Haskell's use of significant whitespace…

Re:Python is now the most popular introductory language at t... by e12e on Tuesday July 08, 2014 @05:39PM (#8006873)
I was bit by haskell's whitespace - but I think that was connected to a bug with the do-notation or some such syntactic sugar. In general I think significant whitespace is a great way to deliniate blocks