I’ll make the README clearer with a side-by-side W++ vs Python snippet to highlight the similarities better. Thanks a lot for pointing it out!
Honestly I think you’re leaning too hard into the “Python” marketing. Python is not just a byword for “easy-to-learn dynamically typed language”. It is its own, specific thing, and your language is not the same. You could say something like “inspired by Python” (in certain ways), but claiming to target people who “wish they could write Python on .NET” strikes me as an exaggeration (especially since you can already do that).
I’ll tweak the README to make that clearer. Appreciate the honest feedback!
> significant indentation and dynamic typing
are absolutely the worst parts of Python. I can understand dynamic typing for scripting purposes, no real qualms there, but significant whitespace is on its face absolutely insane (significant characters that are literally invisible).
It might not be a highly visible downside, but it's there nonetheless. It's better to be honest about that than pretend there is no cultural tradeoff that comes with making such a (IMO) terrible design decision in a language.
There are plenty of people that feel the same way about sigils (like `$foo` in Perl) and semi-colons. I've never understood it -- and likely never will, at this point -- but I don't pretend that there isn't a real demographic effect that these choices bring with them.
Biggest downside: copying and pasting code breaks in a lot of apps.
Jira, Teams, and probably some others, eat whitespace for breakfast. So if a coworker gives me a code snippet they have to manually edit it (often not even possible) OR I have to, or it won't even run. And since the whitespace is significant, it can't be auto formatted.
Whereas with C# you can copy the most fucked up snippet, put it in your editor and boom - auto-formatted and compiles.
Python’s grammar works great for expressions-inside-statements (and expressions-inside-expressions), but it can’t do statements-inside-expressions. Every attempt to support the latter turns out really ugly, at least in corner cases.
That said, I totally agree that full anonymous functions would be useful (especially for more complex logic). Might explore adding those later, but I love the message the current model sends.
W++ leans that way just to reduce boilerplate and keep the syntax clean for smaller scripts, but it’s not trying to be the “one true way” to write .NET code. Honestly, it’s all about exploring what a lightweight .NET scripting layer could feel like.
Appreciate you checking it out