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Comment by RodgerTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

I still hold out some hope for the Java language, but I share many of your feelings. My main issue in searching for another language is that I don't see many imperative languages with the same kind of methodical approach to object-oriented design and comparable language support for concurrency. The C++ build environment feels like going back to the stone age after using a compiler like javac, and while D seems interesting it still appears to be a rather severe step backwards. Many of Python's design decisions (significant whitespace, idiomatic exceptions-as-flow-control, duck-typing) really rub me the wrong way. I've been tinkering with Lua and FORTH to keep myself sharp, but I can't imagine treating either as a replacement bread-and-butter language like Java.

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significant whitespace

Many years ago, this delayed me looking seriously into Python. But when its powerful data structures finally convinced me to start using it, I quickly became accustomed to significant whitespace: I always indented my code correctly anyway, whatever language I'd use. So it was just a case of dropping the { and }. After a few hours I was accustomed to it.

The funny thing is, I still program a lot in C++ and PHP (and Java sometimes). When I write these languages, I fall back on using { and } like I did before, without even noticing it.

Getting proficient in a new language doesn't make you forget your old languages.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but of the three gripes I mentioned whitespace is the least of my concerns. The syntax of Python bothers me much less than the design philosophy.

Any specifics? I may be using Python for so long that I got used to its warts. Some outside perspective could be useful.

I can't answer for the parent poster, but one thing specifically irked me about Python and that was the variable scoping rules and the lack of forced declaration.

The result was that any misspelling of variables could result in extremely difficult to find bugs. This was a final straw that pushed me over the "I don't really care for the syntax of this language much" cliff.

Not a showstopper, but combined with a number of other small complaints, Python "rubbed me the wrong way" too. Yeah, significant whitespace alone isn't a problem. Lack of variable definition by itself isn't a big deal. Explicit "Self" as a parameter is kind of annoying but makes sense. The lame anonymous functions that don't have the full power of the language are ugly. Taken together those are enough to turn me off to the language.

BUT, Python has a few killer features like great libraries, flexible built in data structures, and an excellent foreign function interface. If I needed a scripting language for a native-code app it would be one of the top choices.

By the way, my experience with Python is a few years old, I don't know if anything's changed with the new version.

Edit to add: Other dynamic languages have various solutions to the variable declaration problem, usually involving a parser or compiler warning when you use an unbound variable. Python's syntax would have to change to make that possible, I think.

> any misspelling of variables could result in extremely difficult to find bugs

Weird. Unless all you do is to attribute them values, Python will complain when you try to use a name that's not in the current namespace.

> The lame anonymous functions

I too complained a lot about them. In the end, all I had to do was to declare the function in the closest scope and pass it to whatever would use the anon function. No big deal.

> warning when you use an unbound variable

Python throws an error when you try to use an unbound name. Python is not BASIC.

The lame anonymous functions that don't have the full power of the language are ugly.

Tis true, python lambdas are lame, but in practice, their use has been mostly superceded by list (and now set and dictionary) comprehensions.

I don't understand. If you mistype a name, you'll get an error when you run the code.

If you mistype a name, you'll get an error when you run the code.

Depends on the context of the typo. I've had errors along the lines of

  bar=False
  ...
  bat=True
  ...
  if bar:
    print "Hi"

And wondered why "Hi" was never printed. Of course the problem is hardly unique to Python.

As much as I dislike .NET in general (there are some excellent parts) and doing large enterprisey development, I think C# is an excellent language that is only getting better. C# started out as a clone of Java, but it seems to be what Java could have been if it had evolved more rapidly.

If you're concerned about concurrency support, there are new features in .NET 4.0 that I find pretty impressive and nice to use.

That said, I don't know if the story for developing C# applications on Mono is as solid as Visual Studio.

Interesting.. In what way does D seem like a severe step backwards to you? Is that assumption based on the library support or the language itself?

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