…from people who seem to refuse to install paredit or coloring plugins for either? ps lisp syntax ftw, it’s a feature!
No, YAML can fuck right off. I hate that this shit format is used for cloud stuff.
YAML is the Excel of data formats due to the Norway Problem
since yaml is just a superset of json, you can easily avoid all problems like this
yaml is like a less strict json for me
OK, that’s excessively “convenient” for booleans. But I don’t get the passionate YAML hate, seems like a simple enough language for config. Didn’t have the pleasure (“pleasure”?) to work with it though, so what’s why else is it shitty?
A property can have the wrong indentation and it would still be a syntactically correct yaml. It’s hard to distinguish whether a line is wrongly indented or not. Copy and paste a line and mistakenly use the wrong indentation, and the entire production breaks.
In json it’s much harder to do similar mistakes.
Since it’s a superset of JSON, couldn’t you just use the JSON notation if you hate the semantic whitespace?
I hate YAML so much
Who hates s-expressions? They’re elegant as fuck…
Python, on the other hand, deserves all the hate it gets for making whitespace syntactically significant - I even prefer Go’s hamfisted
go fmtapproach to a forced syntax to python’s bullshit.I dgaf about indices starting at 0 or 1, I can deal with case-insensitivity, but syntactically significant whitespace drives me up the wall.
What’s so hard to understand about it? It’s how you should format your code anyway. Only it’s enforced.
It’s quite often I have to second guess whether the code is correctly intended or not. Is this line supposed to be part of this if block or should I remove that extra indentation? It’s not always entirely obvious. Extra troublesome during refactors.
In other languages it’s always obvious when a line is incorrectly indented.
sometimes, a script needs to be edited in a plain text editor, without having access to an lsp or any other dev tools.
No it’s how Python wants you to format. Many times I want to separate two logical sections in one function and can’t coz Python go crazy
Can you give a concrete example? Because I don’t understand what you mean.
Are you saying that you want to separate your two logical sections by having different levels of indentation and that’s what makes Python go crazy?
Just put them in separate functions. If you have too many levels of indent, your code is convoluted. Sticking to the line length limit sometimes forces you to write more lines than you’d like to. But it makes everything so much more readable that it’s 100% worth the trade off
What if the logic is more readable in one function?
I use whitespace to make my code more legible, python forces more whitespace consistency but it comes at the cost of limiting the legibility.
Yeah, it is a completely nonsensical thing to complain about. I hate to go around matching curly brackets like some braindead nematode. If you use more than two levels you should rewrite the code in most cases… just use advanced indexing and vectorization (by pythonic ;p). Or you can loop around like a freaking peasent in your inefficient garbage code that nobody can read because it is cluttered with comments explaining basic stuff. There is a reason Python is popular… and it is not because no one can read it. Same goes for dynamic typing - it is a blessing for most tasks. I do not want to explain to the machine what every temporary variables means…
I hate em cos regardless of language auto formatter takes care of everything. So now im typing extra characters and fucking shit up and confusing myself when moving code between scopes.
I agree but still you can oftentimes expect that the average person’s initial reaction to be somehow reluctant… until they understand it. it’s like those foods and drinks that you might need to try a couple times before you start enjoying them.
Oh, definitely, they can look bizarre and confusing before you understand them.
In 20 years of using Python, I never had one issue with the indentation. Use spaces all the time, use PyCharm, and that’s it.
Whitespace is statistically insignificant in Python.
Load-bearing whitespace is a mistake.
I don’t get why people hate semantic whitespace. The whitespace would be there anyway, and if anything it’s easier to read as long as you avoid 15 nested if statements, and you’re not using a dynamically typed abomination like python.
S-expressions are a hack because the Lisp devs didn’t know how to make an actual compiler, and instead had the users write the syntax tree for them. (For legal reasons I am being facetious).
In all honesty, I can understand the reason people love s-expressions, but to me they’re just unreadable at a glance.
Semantic whitespace is awful because whitespace (something that you can’t actually see) has meaning in how the program runs. Braces
{}for scopes gives you the ability to easily tell at a glance where a scope ends. Whitespace doesn’t allow for that. Especially, especially when you can accidentally exit a scope (two new lines in a row with Python) and it’s not actually an error (Pythons global scope). Yeah formatters and linters make this less of an issue but it sucks… Languages with legible symbols for scoping are significantly easier to reason about, seeendsymbols in Lua.S-expressions are a hack because the Lisp devs didn’t know how to make an actual compiler, and instead had the users write the syntax tree for them. (For legal reasons I am being facetious).
Just for anyone thinking you are serious; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression I love how S-expression existed.
McCarthy had planned to develop an automatic Lisp compiler (LISP 2) using M-expressions as the language syntax and S-expressions to describe the compiler’s internal processes. Stephen B. Russell read the paper and suggested to him that S-expressions were a more convenient syntax. Although McCarthy disapproved of the idea, Russell and colleague Daniel J. Edwards hand-coded an interpreter program that could execute S-expressions.[2] This program was adopted by McCarthy’s research group, establishing S-expressions as the dominant form of Lisp.
And for anybody thinking of implementing M-expressions, look at Wolfram Mathematica, which is the only popular M-expression-oriented language. It turns out that high-level graph-rewriting semantics are difficult to make efficient! (If you want to try, you might also want to look at GHC or other efficient graph-rewriters to see what the state of the art is like outside Planet Wolfram.)
I literally can’t see whitespace, it gives me headaches looking for it. With brackets, I can get bracket matching in my IDE.
So I’m going to say what I always say when people complain about semantic whitespace: Your code should be properly indented anyway. If it’s not, it’s a bad code.
I’m not saying semantic whitespace is superior to brackets or parentheses. It’s clearly not. But it’s not terrible either.
As someone who codes in Python pretty much everyday for years, I NEVER see indentation errors. I didn’t see them back when I started either. Code without indentation is impossible to read for me anyway so it makes zero difference whether the whitespace has semantic meaning or not. It will be there either way.
Python decided to use a single convention (semantic whitespace) instead of two separate ones for machine decodeable scoping and manual/visual scoping. That’s part of Python’s design principle. The program should behave exactly like what people expect it to (without strenuous reasoning exercises).
But some people treat it as the original sin. Not surprised though. I’ve seen developers and engineers nurture weird irrational hatred towards all sorts of conventions. It’s like a phobia.
Similar views about yaml. It may not be the most elegant - it had to be the superset of JSON, after all. But Yaml is a semi-configuration language while JSON is a pure serialization language. Try writing a kubernetes manifest or a compose file in pure JSON without whitespace alignment or comments (which pure JSON doesn’t support anyway). Let’s see how pleasant you find it.
This leads to weird bugs when you change indentation and miss a line or reorder lines. The logic changes. Not too bad when you’re on your own, as Python seems to be intended for. Add multiple developers and git merges and it is a recipe for disaster. With end tags at least you just end up with poorly formatted working code.
It’s probably more prone to mistakes like that, true. But in practice I really never witnessed this actually being a problem. Especially with tests and review.
The number of times I move code around and can just press a hotkey to fix indentation though. Not possible with Python.
Yeah, that’s definitely a good point. But it’s a minor thing. Adjusting indentation takes 2 keystrokes in vim, I barely notice it.
one of my least favorite things about python is semantic whitespace. no need to comment on yaml.
fuck it, parenthesis all the way.
This sums up how I feel nicely. No issues with parens…but whitespace…fuck that shit
Clearly, the superiour mode is to just use keyword based scoping (à la Ruby
do ... end). When I was a kid I read an OBSCENE MAGAZINE where I saw a Forth program godup dup dupand I was like “ok so what’s the problem here? Things happen and everything is just keywords?” and my young mind was corrupted forever I guessyou’ll pry my END command from my cold, dead hands…
a = [ Haskell , is , the , GOAT ]It’s fascinating how s-expressions are both data type and language syntax. Such power. Only other time I saw something remotely like this was XSLT & XML, which I admittedly do not miss one bit.
But s-expressions give you power that other syntax doesn’t. Data and code as one. Besides there is no other syntax than simply that so it becomes much easier to remember random extra things.
Whitespace on the other hand, I hate with fiber of my being.
Yes definitely. However Rust manages to become extensible and capable of constructing powerful DSLs out of it’s macros without using S-expressions. But I still find them prettier than Rust’s syntax.
Yew, what the fuck
I love python: Fight me IRL.fine i will take the bait: thats 5 spaces
As long as the next line also has 5 spaces, that’s fine. Python only complains about inconsistency, not the exact number of spaces/tabs.
Make, on the other hand… Ugh.
apples and oranges is why
