[ale] Ruby vs C, a non-technical chat

[Jim Lynch]

Many years ago Byte magazine had a column written by Jerry Pournelle (SF 
author) that I really enjoyed reading.  In one article that I recall he 
talked about using Electric Pencil as his editor of choice when writing 
(not programming).  His reason for that was it didn't get in the way of 
his creativity the way word processors did.  I find that trying to 
program in Python is to me what a word processor is to Jerry.  I don't 
want to think about where to put spaces.  I use languages that have 
curly braces  and use them with abandon. When I've got what I think I 
want, I use the indent feature of vi to make the code pretty and check 
to see if it's right.  I'm completely in agreement with JD.

Jim.
On 08/06/2015 11:42 AM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> The day I have to care how many spaces I put into a program is the day they will
> shot me in the head.
>
> I'm all for whitespace - beautifiers should enforce that, NOT the language.
> There are many reasons for this, but I suppose those reasons don't matter in
> python, because there isn't any choice.  In other languages which do allow
> optional blocking, one of the most common errors is when people decide not to
> use the blocking syntax and assume a 1 liner after an "if" carries on when a 2nd
> line is entered.  The indentation CAUSED the issue/bug.
A reason I think Perl has the right idea.  Mandatory curlies.