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Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

>which is already what we are doing with most languages that don't care about indentation!

No that's not what the other languages are doing. They have explicit structure defined in the code (with Lisps being at the extreme end), which allows the development environment to automatically present the code in a way that's easy to read. This frees the developer from the job of manually formatting their code like some sort of caveman.

As someone with 8+ years of experience of programming in Python for a job, I've seen countless of bugs spawned by incorrectly indented code, which is incredibly difficult to spot. I've seen people far more experienced than me make these bugs because they didn't notice something being misindented. To me, the fact that we have to deal with this is laughable. Especially considering it's so easy to fix Python the language so that indentation becomes unambiguous: add an "end" statement for each deindent (aka closing brace).

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> No that's not what the other languages are doing.

Is this a claim that people do not indent in other languages and leave it to the dev environment? Yes, those languages don't rely on indentation but people do still manually indent or rely on their environment to indent it for them to make the code remotely readable. I for one cannot read Java without it also being indented correctly.

> This frees the developer from the job of manually formatting their code like some sort of caveman.

I honestly don't understand this part. What tools are you using that don't do indentation for you? Emacs and vim extensions, vscode, Pycharm, atom...all of them have very intuitive indentation for when you type. The most you have to do is hit backspace after finishing a block.

> Especially considering it's so easy to fix Python the language so that indentation becomes unambiguous: add an "end" statement for each deindent (aka closing brace).

As someone with a lot of Ruby experience, the "end" is absolutely not more clear than indentation. There's a reason environments highlight do-end pairs together: because it's hard to know which ones match which.

>people do still manually indent or rely on their environment to indent it for them

Nobody manually indents their code. Almost any language other than Python is unambiguous to indent, so the computer does it for you.

>I for one cannot read Java without it also being indented correctly.

That's easy, just copy paste Java code into an editor and press a button to indent everything. Voila! Good luck if you're dealing with Python code which got misindented somehow (e.g. copying from some social network website which uses markup that doesn't preserve whitespace, which is most of them).

>What tools are you using that don't do indentation for you?

Python code cannot be re-indented unambiguously. So if you copy paste a chunk of Python code from one place to another, you can't just press a button to reindent everything. You have to painstakingly move it to the right level and hope that it still works. In Common Lisp I just press Ctrl-Alt-\ and everything becomes indented correctly.

>The most you have to do is hit backspace after finishing a block.

That works if you only write new code and never have to change existing code.

>There's a reason environments highlight do-end pairs together: because it's hard to know which ones match which.

No, the open/close brackets allow the IDE to highlight them so that the programmer can clearly see the scope of the code block. This is a useful feature of the language. In Python it's almost impossible to see which deindent matches what if the function is long enough/deep enough.

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