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Hey, thanks for your interest. I think it's interesting that you think I don't care about things like whitespace vs braces? In the Lex interview I was kidding around, but I assure you, I do care.

Braces are strictly worse than whitespace indentation for several reasons. Brace-based languages:

1) Generally have the "dangling else" set of ambiguities. 2) Some (e.g. C) allow but do not require braces which leads to style debates. The ones that require braces are more verbose. 3) Require more punctuation clutter, and consume more vertical whitespace in practice. 4) ... use braces that are completely redundant with indentation in practice!

It's super funny to see people defend curly based languages. Using curlies but not indenting properly is almost always a sign of a bug (e.g. clang has warnings for this sort of thing due to the "goto fail" and other debacles.

That said, as you also know, Python compat is not optional for us, so Mojo doesn't actually a choice at all here. I find it amusing though that your post acknowledges thoughtfulness in language design and thinks this is an example of a lapse of judgement. :P

-Chris

> It's super funny to see people defend curly based languages.

Well, that's because they're not really "strictly worse" in every way. I find curly braces helpful for readability and cursor navigation. The latter is only possible with Python by completely parsing the code. Also I don't like reading vertically dense code, so having (almost) empty lines inbetween is fine. All subjective of course, but that's the case for every aspect of language syntax.

> Using curlies but not indenting properly is almost always a sign of a bug

I don't think anyone criticising Python's syntax cares about the freedom to have inconsistent indentation, that's not the point.

Chris,

Ha! I love your reply. Thank you.

I know you care about language design. As I said more or less, that's self-evident, and I'm sorry for taking your whitespace comments too literally. You're the source, after all, not me, so accept my apologies there. It's misinterpretation, but not meant to be a misrepresentation. :-)

My comment wasn't meant to be critical of you. Honestly, as a pretty famous engineer, it never even crossed my mind you might read my message. As I said, I know you have to deal with reality to accomplish your goal, and that reality existed before you showed up to take on the challenge.

Thank you for all your contributions and good luck on Mojo.

Chris

No worries at all, it's such a polarizing discussion point and always comes up. :)

Curly braces are very helpful during development, because you can scope code without having to reindent it. It's quite similar to being able to comment out a block of code, which Python happens to also make somewhat frustrating.

> But my god, what if the community had gravitated to a better language [for these purposes] in the first place? How much further along would we be in our tooling and capabilities to deliver value?

Better in what regard? Performance? Maybe there are more important things than performance, like ease of use and barriers to entry.

People in this space already tackle essentially complex problems, don't throw more accidental complexity in the form of "better" or more performant languages/APIs.

What other scripting languages are even on the table as straight improvements to Python?

It seems like there are some potential candidates with improvements in dimension X, but nothing that is an obvious alternative.

People gravitate to python because "good libraries are all you need".

Python is fantastic at lashing things together, and most programming is combining pre-existing functionality.

if the better languages were actually good, they wouldn't have allowed python to whip their asses. Python won because it was nice and easy. meet your users where they are, not where you want them to be.

That would be simplifying too much. There are a lot of external factors for something being popular, like timing, luck, support from big enterprises and leading colleges, inertia and sunk costs. You could argue that does make python better regardless of the language itself but that poster was talking about a hypothetical scenario in which those factors were won by a language better designed for those tasks. Would you use python if most libraries, docs and support were elsewhere just for the language design as is today?

Richard Feldman states in a video aiming to explain the popularity of OOP that Python initially had a small community for decades, and that Python's increase in popularity followed a slow and steady increase, which is not true of many other languages like Ruby. That's corroborated by the graph in this article. [0]

Based on Python's slow and steady incresae, timing and luck don't seem like good factors for explaining its popularity. The others are debatable though.

[0]

https://flatironschool.com/blog/python-popularity-the-rise-o...

I fail to see how timing and luck isn't a factor. It's more than how popular it was when it launched, many of those languages that are allegedly better had a strong timing disadvantage by either not existing or not being mature once the data science boom occurred (including equivalents to libraries like numpy, scipy, matplotlib and theano), allowing python to be the right option then. Any language that missed the timing must now play catch up with a fraction of the resources and completely unproven in the market.

Luck is harder to quantify, but at the very least competitors like common lisp didn't have much of it.

Also, Python is where the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" type stuff really started being a massive phenomenon.

Language wars have been forever, of course. But for a few years around 2010-ish, practically every single thread would have someone bringing up Python. If the post was about a tool, how the thing should have really been written in Python. If it was a how-to tutorial about a feature in another language, there would be a subthread about how Python undeniably does it better. Not occasionally, in a thread here and there - it was to the extent you couldn't miss it even if you wanted to. That's a kind of marketing that's proven effective in a forum like this, which is why it's being replicated by other languages now.

Python won in the data science/ML/AI crowds, and most of the hard work is being done by C code. In other industries, Python ranges from " successful with multiple contenders" (web) to "niche/unusable" (mobile and gaming).

The curly brace community already has tons of great choices. Let indent people have their mojo.

I should have deleted that whole section. I know, I know. Sure, in some world, a whitespace character should dictate placement and lifetime in memory. That's my not preferred world, but also different spokes for different folks. :-)

Totally agree. It’s not even the stuff that most people complain about (e.g. whitespace) it’s the poor decisions that in hindsight which limit performance or make correct code harder to write… and we’re totally avoidable in hindsight.

> if the community had gravitated to a better language

As someone that started to use python for science relatively soon (before numpy), I have to ask: which better language was existing at this time ?