Yeah, I don't get the author at all. Using indentation is so, so, so, so, much cleaner and easier to understand, even with lots of nesting than trying to figure out if you closed all the stupid curly braces, curly braces be damned.
The standard Python developer response to that is, "Aha! You like braces because they enable your bad programming practices!"
However, I found the best way to illustrate that point is this: I asked him, "If you're never allowed to use a text editor/IDE that highlights braces or the space between them ever again would you still prefer braces to indentation?"
I had to re-explain this concept several times but eventually I think he understood my point at least a little bit...
"Aha! You're using spaces because Python lacks decent development tools! In fact, because there's no static typing you can't even make a decent IDE for Python! Spaces are a crutch!"
Sigh.
Imagine an if, inside of a foreach, inside of a function definition, inside of a class. This is not terrible code, it's perfectly reasonable.
Now you're indented four levels in. Now combine this with some rather unreasonable and outdated assumptions that PEP8 (automatically enforced in many shops and OSS projects) has, like pretending that people are still on glass terminals and that anything longer than 79 characters is a problem. It also insists on four-space tabs, so this very simple construct has eaten 20% of your line budget.
..not to mention how it makes your code harder to read. I also share the author's concern about how you're less able to separate your debug code from your actual code.
I too used to leave debug-code purposefully unindented. There are other ways to handle that and the loss is negligible to me considering there can't be misplaced braces in Python in return.
More concretely, I often find deeply indented code more difficult to read. There are more local variables to keep track of and breaking it out into a function helps encapsulate and name what's going on. Even from your description I might look to see if I could use a generator to filter the loop instead of "for" and "if" which should be more clear, fewer indentations, and easier to optimize at runtime. I do find trying to break up long line onto multiple rather annoying because diffs are more difficult to read.
I've never really used whitespace to separate my debug and actual code...which probably speaks more to my background than anything else. I have tended to put a # at the beginning of the line when debugging and next to the comment when commenting. Linters don't seem to care for that, but the code is tidied up before it's committed.
This is just plain false. PyCharm does, and I am sure there are others.
Being visually impaired and also having coded since before syntax-highlighting editors became standard, yes. A brace character is something that's easy to visually perceive; whitespace isn't.
It's definitely an opinion your allowed to have, though not using the language over it would be rather draconian.
If that is a keyword, or brackets, or whatever, I would prefer that. You can't minify or easily lint python. And you can't easily tell if there are mixed indent methods (tabs/spaces) and IDEs struggle with it vs. a simple bracket structure.
(This is a rare repost within a thread. I'm punching that card for 2018. Whitespace significance is my #1 issue with Python. I love the language, hate this feature.)
I find that the linting available in Python is better than that in c++, though c++ has better auto complete.
Minification of most of Python is possible, although shouldn't be considered of any value since it's not passed over the wire to a user.
Yes. (Though that's hardly the worst thing about Python.)
Their lack in Python bothered me too, one afternoon in the spring of 2001, then I moved on.
When I hear someone complaining about it I immediately think, this person hasn't much experience with Python, or is one of those highly inflexible pedant types.
YES!! Every time I try something other than Python that requires braces, I am like "WTF, why do I have to type this extra shit! Such an annoyance."
But it leads to another problem: hatred of typing commas in non-lisps.
The reality is that after a week or so I forgot completely about it. There are other things for sure that became an issue (took awhile to fully grok class variables vs instance variables), but the indentation was never one of them.