Python is pretty to look at, but I hate working in white space sensitive languages. If I have to have another argument about tabs vs. spaces I am going to toss my monitor out the frickin’ window.
Also, it makes autoindent in Emacs worse.
Also, it makes autoindent in Emacs worse.
Here is the thing about indentation versus curly-braces-and-semi-colons: It boggles me that people find it acceptable to use one mechanism to communicate block structure to the compiler, and a completely different mechanism to communicate block structure to humans, and have no way to automatically check that they have the same semantics. This is a frequent source of bugs, and is entirely preventable. When it comes to the ergonomics of computer-convenient versus human-convenient, humans should win. Therefore, significant white space is clearly preferable simply from the standpoint of eliminating the source of an entire class of bugs.
But the main thing that makes Rust harder to read is all the punctuation noise and short, cryptic keywords. While one friend once said: "A good programmer can write FORTRAN in any language.", I don't feel compelled to help them.
Readability matters.
I still prefer whitespace to indicate blocks though.
Strongly agree. The solution that Rust, Go and other new languages have adopted is shipping a formatting tool to consistently make the semantics of indentation and braces match. I personally can't help but think that this is a worse-is-better solution when compared to significant whitespace, but at least it works. Every Rust CI I am setting up will fail the build if `rustfmt --write-mode=diff` feels like you didn't run rustfmt before committing.
> But the main thing that makes Rust harder to read is all the punctuation noise
Given the decision to favor explicit casts, references and dereferences over implicit ones, this cannot really be helped. In some ways, once you get used to it, it helps readability, because it always communicates what the things being worked on are.
> and short, cryptic keywords.
I agree that this was probably a mistake. Cannot really be helped now, though.
Overall, I think the readability argument against Rust is overstated. Sure, when you are starting out it looks like line noise, especially if compared to python. But it didn't take me more than a week or two before it basically became entirely clear and readable. The radical explicitness of the language helps readability in many ways that make it much better than C++.
Of course, much better than C++ is a low bar to pass.
Python is ugly and inconsistent as hell due to lack of methods (no maps or reduce in collections for example), indentation, lack of expressions (nearly everything is a statement) and one statement lambdas.
Though rust is beyond good and evil indeed, I really don't get this obsession with brackets and C-like abominations like &*staff. Ada or SML are doing a much better job.
Autoindent is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in Python in the first place. Having two independent representations for blocks, one for human readers (indent) and one for compilers (braces), leads to nasty bugs when they get out of sync. Autoindent is a tool to keep them in sync. In Python there is a single representation, so nothing can get out of sync.
> If I have to have another argument about tabs vs. spaces I am going to toss my monitor out the frickin’ window.
Clearly the correct answer is spaces. /s
Seriously though, I like python because not only is it pretty, it's also concise. While it's not perfect, a lot of time has been spent on language features to make them easily comprehendable.
The lesson for me from python is that UX is important, even in programming languages.
I think it's funny how people still have issues with this in 2018.
intmain()
{
r etu rn0;
} DO I = 1.100
DOI = 1.1
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/9.54.html#subj1