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Every python developer I know uses an auto formatter today, and never needs to think about it (ruff, black). It's not ambiguous and is immediately visible if something has the wrong indent.

(On other projects, I often wish other languages had formatters as good and standard as the Python ecosystem. I have many complaints about Python but whitespace is just not a problem I've seen)

by pjmlp3 hours ago|

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Today and forever, I was using ActiveState IDEs back in the day, I started using Python in version 1.6.

Also it isn't the only one, many ML derived languages also use indentation, including the famous F#, Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell,....

by dgellow11 hours ago|

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You missed the point. I’m well aware python has formatters, I use them and implemented my own. The point was that when generating/manipulating python code you cannot just generate in whatever format then run a formatter. you need to carefully keep track of the exact indentation at place where the code in written

by usef-9 hours ago|

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Fair. That is a very slight friction on what is quite a small niche, though (compared to the wider ecosystem of developers). And most that need similar will use AST or runtime construction.

The trivial kind of raw source generation is still trivial, but I'm guessing you're doing embedding/templates or something?

by dgellow4 hours ago|

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It’s definitely niche!

by ameliaquining9 hours ago|

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If I were doing this, and the code generator was itself in Python, I'd probably use ast and/or tokenize to avoid having to manipulate literal whitespace.

by jhbadger8 hours ago|

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Have you never tried to paste python code from the internet into an editor? At least half the time the indentation is screwed up and I have to go in and figure out manually where to put the spaces in. Indentation gets screwed up by pasting in other languages too, but with those I can generally tell the editor to reindent and it can because the information is included in the source code.

by ameliaquining9 hours ago|

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Python's significant indentation does have real costs, but they mostly don't affect experienced programmers working on real codebases in real editors or IDEs. Rather, they are things like, it makes the REPL more cumbersome, and newbies sometimes find that code they copy-paste from the Web mysteriously fails to work.

by tyre15 hours ago|

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Oh nooooo, they fucked it up too. Why would someone make a language that’s whitespace sensitive? It’s confounding.

by syrrim14 hours ago|

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Why would someone make a language where the programmer and the interpreter have two different ways of figuring out where blocks start and end?

by ioasuncvinvaer14 hours ago|

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at the closing curly?

by syrrim14 hours ago|

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Programmers look at the indentation.

by larodi13 hours ago|

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this discussion is so dated...

by syrrim13 hours ago|

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llms prefer indents too

by larodi4 hours ago|

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They seem to be quite okay with oneliners, have you not noticed ?

by BeetleB14 hours ago|

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To weed out programmers who don't indent.

by ekianjo6 hours ago|

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identation should be something the compiler does not care about

by pjmlp3 hours ago|

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Like with array base indexes, there are plenty of languages that start with something other than zero, and many that use indentation, including a few well known in hacker circles, Python isn't alone.

by grim_io13 hours ago|

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I never understood this.

What kind of special whitespace requirements do people have?

by pansa212 hours ago|

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I like significant invitation, but I still wouldn’t choose it if I was designing a language today.

Functional-style programming has become much more popular since Python was designed in the 1990s, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to have Python-like significant indentation and also support true anonymous functions.

by pjmlp3 hours ago|

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True anonymous functions has nothing to do with indentation, ML derived languages are also indentation based.

Guido doesn't want them in the language, as simple as that.

by winding7 hours ago|

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As I understand it, Mojo’s goal is to be able to match state of the art performance for parallel algorithms and be able to use the exotic GPU hardware. A functional style is not necessarily productive in that context.

One interesting PL concept they implement are linear types https://mojolang.org/docs/std/traits/anytype/AnyType/

by maleldil10 hours ago|

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Haskell has significant indentation and anonymous functions.

by ameliaquining9 hours ago|

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Haskell's significant indentation is, in my experience, much worse than Python's at fading into the background by matching what you would have done anyway.

by jampekka4 hours ago|

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Scala 3, F#, CoffeeScript, Nim, Haskell, Elm, PureScript...

by 13 hours ago|

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deleted

by mplewis15 hours ago|

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