Armin Ronacher points out that in some aspects, Ruby is more sensitive to white space than Python. (Via Simon Willison.) What I can say with confidence is that I am more sensitive to white space than Python or Ruby, and I’ll also add that civilized developers adapt to the conventions of the language that they’re using. I guess what I’m saying is that arguments against Python or Ruby based on how they handle white space are fundamentally weak. In the end, they all seem to boil down to, “It doesn’t look enough like C for me to be comfortable.”
July 1, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I learned recently that the argument that “well programmers indent nicely anyway, so what’s the big deal?” is complete rubbish. After looking at a lot of different code from a lot of different programmers, many really don’t indent consistently at all.
So being forced to indent logically really is demanding extra work that people didn’t have to do in their favourite languages.
It’s scary.