Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)

On 30/08/2024 17:14, John Ames wrote:

On Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:27:36 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
 

/All/ languages, except perhaps Bart's private language that is only
used by him, have their annoyances.  I have worked at least a little
with a fair number of languages, and I've never seen one that I
thought was "perfect".  But different people have different things
that the like and dislike about any given language.
>
So if you have the choice of which language to use (many programmers
do not), you pick one that has more things you like for the task in
question in comparison to the things you don't like.

 Sure - but picking one that best suits your needs doesn't mean you
can't critique its annoyances/flaws. This team-sports mentality is just
weird.

(I gather the politically correct response to that is "I'm not weird - /you/ are weird" :-) )
There's a difference between critiquing something and saying the language designers were stupid.  I can say I prefer explicit blocking delimiters.  I can give reasons why I think those are better than white-space based blocks.  But to have any kind of useful discussion, you need to be able to consider what advantages the alternatives have, and think about why some people might have different opinions.  Writing "I get lost with white-space indentation and have to add lots of comments - therefore the language is flawed and the designers made stupid decisions" is not helpful critique - it's just ranting.
Of course you will find things you dislike about any language you use. And discussing those things, and ways to mitigate their impact, is also fine.  It's the "this language is fundamentally flawed because /I/ dislike a particular aspect of it" attitude I disagree with.

 

But it's important to understand that these are opinions - the
designers of Python were /not/ stupid to have made the language that
way.  They just had different opinions from you, and the had a much
better basis for forming those opinions than you or I.

 Yeah, well, your opinion that my opinion is just, like, my opinion is
just, like, your opinion, man.