Hacker News Reader

I think as programmers we forget that syntax is a pain for newcomers. Scratch tackles that problem at least.

There is that. I've seen it a lot when trying to tutor beginner programmers. It takes a lot of time for people to get used to every little symbol and space being critically important. It takes even longer to get people used to maintaining coding standards so that what they write is easy to understand. I start to view Python's significant whitespace as a feature here - it's a net plus to tell beginners that your spacing must be correct right off the bat, or your program won't work right.

> It takes even longer to get people used to maintaining coding standards so that what they write is easy to understand.

Formatting tools with a standard default syntax solve that problem quite nicely, and they do it more effectively than something as error-prone as significant whitespace.

I disagree that it solves the problem I described. For beginner users, every extra tool you set up exponentially increases their setup efforts. They are highly likely to be skipped or bypassed, and it's not like they're contributing to large group projects yet. It's more beneficial for at least a few core standards to be enforced at the language level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com