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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Python dev since 2008 and I can count on one finger where this has actually been an issue. I'd love have you enumerate the "all kinds of weird errors" for me. Not saying you're wrong, mind you, just want to understand.

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Since 2000, there were a few times in that first afternoon while doing the tutorial... March 2000? I think, but then I configured my editor to use spaces and subtly show tabs. That was the last time, yeah.

People that complain about whitespace haven't used Python much, it's a dead giveaway.

And yet, the benefits are enormous, I've probably skipped typing a hundred thousand redundant braces since then, and ended up with more readable code.

I have to agree - the only whitespace-related errors I've ever come across are "IndentationErrors" - which are pretty easy to resolve.

I remember a bug caused by that, due to a merge, where an instruction went out of an if block.

I wonder if it was an automatic merge or whether someone just didn't eyeball the code properly?

That's scary... this is why I'm unhappy with merge tools that don't understand the underlying language

Ok this sounds legit. Thank you. But if you think about this carefully it means that two people wrote the exact same expression in different scopes, which seems really, really odd, no? I'm trying to contrive this in my mind and I'm having difficulty (my fault, obvs).

If this happens again it deserves its own blog post describing the situation carefully!

Tabs are considered the same as 8 spaces, so if you ever have a single moment of lax enforcement of "only tabs" or "only spaces" you can get bizarre results.

Jumping on this wagon. Have been using and teaching Python for more than 10 years and have never seen any weirdness. Python actually warns when there are mixed tabs in blocks.

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