…from people who seem to refuse to install paredit or coloring plugins for either? ps lisp syntax ftw, it’s a feature!
Go home OP, you’re drunk.
And give us your keys, you’ve had too much minimalism to drive.
Yew, what the fuck
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.
I literally can’t see whitespace, it gives me headaches looking for it. With brackets, I can get bracket matching in my IDE.
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 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.
What, you don’t like tabs and spaces being syntactically different?
(Sarcasm/deadpan detected but I’ll respond anyways).
Not when they are visibly the same and the spaces have no other meaning in that context.
Not to mention tabs being annoying in general because of how badly it works to adjust the distance of tab stops. That doesn’t really affect this particular case, but it’s why I generally use spaces instead of tabs.
Most of the annoyance is from vim recognizing that spaces are an error in makefile recipes but still using them unless I copy paste a tab in, including when I hit enter on a line that is using a tab already. It matches the indentation but uses spaces instead of tabs. I’m sure there’s a way to adjust vim config to fix this, but I have yet to acquire the esoteric knowledge required to do so.
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Nah, it’s just vim in my work env. But thanks anyways, I appreciate that you tried!
Python has one of the worst syntaxes out there
I like them both. But I only use lisp for fun.
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.
apples and oranges is why
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
Can you give a concrete example? Because I don’t understand what you mean.
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.
You take that back, python is my homie!
In all seriousness, I freely admit that I’m biased towards python because it was my first language and remains my favorite. I use an IDE for anything but the simplest scripts, so I’ve very rarely had any issues with spacing.
a = [ Haskell , is , the , GOAT ]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 guess
I hate YAML so much
No, YAML can fuck right off. I hate that this shit format is used for cloud stuff.
Since it’s a superset of JSON, couldn’t you just use the JSON notation if you hate the semantic whitespace?
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.
I think TOML found a pleasant compromise there
It’s hard to distinguish whether a line is wrongly indented or not.
That’s very much not my experience. I use YAML regularly and while I’ve had copy paste indentation errors when I look at the offending line it’s always obvious to me how to fix the indentation. The only indentation thing that’s ever given me trouble is embedding YAML as a string within a file that uses tabs.
Do a search for ‘why yaml is bad’ and you’ll get a lot of stories.
Constant passing problems, especially when the yaml gets very large and complex. After I implemented a new feature I was pulled into a call with 12-15 people demanding to know why it didn’t work. The new feature worked fine, The guys yaml had the wrong amount of white space and so it didn’t parse.
White space in the wrong place? Fails Wrong amount of tabs? Fail
Working in a big configuration file that has a lot of nesting? Good luck.
Best part is that most of these things don’t throw errors or anything, it just doesn’t work and you are left scratching your head as to why your deploy only fails in the production environment.
.
This sums up how I feel nicely. No issues with parens…but whitespace…fuck that shit
