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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Don't the first 3 apply just as well to python? It compiles fast, and is duck-typed so interfaces are always there and implicit, and the indent-based blocking ends many arguments about formatting.

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the difference is that if you're not careful when you cut-paste indented blocks in python, you can easily change logic.

If you cut and paste probably the misaligned indentation is the least problem. Cut and paste should be avoided if it's not done during a refactoring (so actual moving of code for better design).

Beginners usually think Python strong indentation is a weakness of the language. I actually find C++ freedom being more error prone:

    if (a < b);
        a = b

It's a not very frequent bug, but when it happens it takes you hours to spot. ;)

Yes and in Go (and hopefully all curly-brace languages of the future) this is actually a syntax error, you need the braces:

  if (a < b) {
     a = b;
  }

And you don't need the semicolons!

The thing I don't get...if braces are mandatory (Good), why keep the now completely, unambiguously, irrelevant () around the cond?

They're actually not required in Go.

You don't need those parens in Go, and go fmt will in fact remove them/

If you ran the code through gofmt, it would remove the () around the cond for you. I code go in SublimeText with GoSublime. On every save it runs the file through gofmt and reformats it for me. Keeps my code looking pretty with very little effort.

This would never happen to me because I frequently format my doc, and it wouldn't be indented.

Python executes, it does not compiles.

EDIT: Whoops, it's actually compiled into bytecode then executed by the VM.

This is not true.

As the_paul said, this is incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)#...

It actually "compiles" into bytecode, then consumed by the interpreter.

it's generous to call the CPython interpreter a VM - the binary encoding of Python isn't some crazy IL bytecode, its' really just python-as-binary. Language constructs converted into opcodes, strings with pre-calculated hashes, and local variables within a scope become a sort of vector... but otherwise, it's a prettymuch 1:1 mapping between Python language constructs and the bytecode form.

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