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Comment by still_grokking | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a Python fan at all but still see much value in clean, DRY syntax.

Significant whitespace is a huge success even in languages that switched to it late! Almost nobody in the F# or Scala¹ community would consider to switch back to that unnecessary line noise which are explicit block markers.

Code should be indented for readability anyway (and almost nobody would dispute that)! So there is just no real value in additional block markers. In fact such block markers make refactorings more difficult than needed.

¹ https://august.nagro.us/scala3-braces.html

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BTW: Contrary to your opinion stated in your profile "subtracting points" for writing things the majority here disagrees with is not fascist in any way but exactly the mechanism that keeps the quality of the comments here high—which in turn attracts those "smart people hanging out here" (who you're praising) in the first place. ;-)

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per se, I don't mind the white spaces--but I don't want to be forced to use them. Like what you see in Julia, or Kotlin. Code is poetry. I should be trusted to organize my code according to how it reflects what it reflects.

I dislike block markers as much as forced white-space, because there is lack of freedom. I understand that this was done so that different people could easily read legacy code but I don't think this helps because despite Python zen, there way too many ways to do the same thing. Why not allow the programmer to get creative so that at least the code is elegant? Elegance is highly readable.

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BTW: I think a good mechanism would be: "do not reward if it is not worth it" and "reward if it is." But the Fascist aspect here is: "punish if it is not worth it." Who decide what is worth what? Opinions vary. If everybody thinks alike, nobody is really thinking. Answers that earn higher points may be attractive to a majority of people, but you well know that the majority are of average intelligence (IQ is normally distributed). So mediocre quality gets upvoted, anything the mediocrity-loving majority doesn't, gets downvoted. Makes sense? The intelligent people I refer to are those who like me, question, probe, disagree, and dare to say it like it is. :) That does not mean the majority.

> unnecessary line noise

It's not noise, though. It protects me from common whitespace issues like careless copying/pasting, style differences between me and other developers, and IDE/OS settings.

It's also just easier to scan. Imagine if we did the same thing with math:

    a * b / (c - d)

Look at that noise! We can get rid of some of those symbols, right? Let's replace parentheses with whitespace instead.

   a*b/ c - d

So now it's denser and I typed fewer characters, but it's harder to scan because my eyes don't register " " as quickly and easily as they register "{".

I don't see the connection between white space in PLs and parenthesis in math.

On the other hand: Let's consider what the Python-like version of math actually look like:

    f(x) = :
        x, if x > 0
        -x/2, if x < 0 and x is even
        0, otherwise

In stead of:

              __
             /
             | x,  if x > 0
    f(x) =  <  -x/2, if x < 0 and x is even
             | 0, otherwise
             \__

The latter is, of course how math actually looks.

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