Jokes on you, we don’t have PR review.

Agreed. I saw this and thought it looked beautifully passive aggressive

Ha! Now I see it - that was very funny, sir!

Heh, so in Python it’s possible to overload operators in the context of objects. I bet it would be possible to overload tabs to do the same thing as colons inside a context manager, but that’s pure speculation.

I’m not the OG on this, just an old reddit post I remembered

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/9fhvyl/writing_yaml/

YAML makes you appreciate Python’s 4 spaces indentation.

That’s true, I wanted to port that to Kate for me to test, but I’m too dumb to port the Scala implementation to QT/KDE framework

Go is in a good position, yeah. JavaScript has prettier, which is nice. Java has google-java-format. Python has ruff, which is quite good. Kotlin has ktfmt, which I believe made a mistake with their standards by not following the standard formatting guidelines for the language, but whatever. Uniform and deterministic for the win.

What do you mean? rustfmt is the de facto standard and is easily run using cargo fmt. Most projects use it along with clippy, the standard linter.

I am a Scala and Rust fan. I can corroborate what you said

The part about no semicolons/curly braces I like in Scala is that I can write a function and it’ll look virtually indistinguishable from a regular ol variable. Functions become much less of a ritual and integrate more nicely with the rest of the code. Other than that though, Rust definitely wins out because of the curly braces & semicolons. I use curly braces in most situations in Scala where I’d normally use them in Rust, and I would use semicolons everywhere in Scala if it weren’t considered unidiomatic. Whitespace-significant syntax is just really annoying to deal with. Using Python or even maybe F# makes me want to die because I keep accidentally missing an indent somewhere or indenting too much somewhere else or using the wrong kind of whitespace and the entire program implodes. At least Scala and Kotlin keep it sane

Also it’s just way harder to visually organize in whitespace based languages. You basically have to do a bunch of magic tricks to make the code look slightly different in a specific scenario than what the language wants you to. Rust allows you to actually visually organize your code easily while also having a strong style rules which you shouldn’t stray too far from (or else the compiler will yell at you).

Well, Python kind of does the reverse of a semicolon: If you want to continue a statement over multiple lines, then you have to \ escape it.

That’s not true. Being within parentheses, brackets, quotes, etc. is enough for the parser to know you’re continuing. In practice, I find that context is already present in most cases.

For the other cases, occasionally surrounding an expression in parentheses is easy enough. Long conditionals probably deserve parentheses anyway, for clarity.

Borland IDEs

Ugh, you just gave me Turbo Basic flashbacks. My favorite thing was that variable names could be as long as you liked and mixed case, but the compiler only used the first two letters and case insensitive at that. So “BatShitCrazy” and “BALLPARKESTIMATE” actually referenced the same variable.

Haha… Yes, I’ve found yaml to be problematic in this area, too. Probably because it lacks the context cues and modularity of a programming language.

When Fortran was created, each line was a separate punched card. The syntax made sense for that medium.

C was setup from the start for use on teletypes with fancy line editors like ed.

It’s often I have to double and triple check to verify I copied the code with correct indentation.

I vaguely remember facing that issue once or twice in the past, but certainly not often. It was because the pasted code was too long for its starting point to be easily found in my editor, even if I scrolled up or down a bit.

If this happens to you often, I wonder: perhaps the code you maintain should be broken into smaller functions anyway? If I was in that situation again, I think I would simply place a bookmark before pasting and then jump back to the bookmark to indent/dedent the pasted block appropriately.

Ruby syntax is nice although I prefer python way of enforcing indentation instead of adding "end"s. Personally I just want a statically typed language with enforced indent as syntax.

That’s just Algol instead of B. Most languages use the one or the other, then there’s sexpr-based languages (lisp, scheme), lua (technically Algol but not needing semicolons while also not needing newlines so it’s definitely special), and layout syntax (Haskell, or, if you want a bad implementation, python).

It’s not just old Haskell code that’s how you write Haskell if you want explicit braces. Well, mostly generate, but it’s still the idiomatic formatting (and when you generate you always generate braces because it’s easy to get layout subtly wrong when generating).

Haskell also does the whole

data Foo = Bar
         | Baz
         | Quux

foo = [ Bar
      , Baz
      , Quux
      ]

thing, makes sense to apply it to braces especially as they’re seen only very rarely. Single-line, yes, but not multi-line.