I’ve been coding around 25 years and got my start in perl. I absolutely hated python when I first used it. I use it all the time now. I still prefer my curly braces but I don’t have any trouble with python or mind the whitespace anymore. I just run it through ruff every save. I do the same with go everything goes through gofumpt. I really think a lot of it is a generational thing. Older people are just used to curly brackets.
I do get peoples complaints about the packaging. Unless you’re a dev already it’s a bit extra to deal with shuffling virtual environments because the system python environments almost never work out of the box, at least in the last few distros I’ve used. Once I adjusted though it’s no problem. I run half my dev stuff in toolboxes with their own environment anyway.
I once wrote a bot in python tdownloaded a ical file, looked for chances and informed me if found. The space indentation made it hell to follow the code in my opinion.
Just curious, what about spaces made it hard? What language would have been easier? In curly brace languages, 99% of the time, a curly brace is followed by a line break and an indent. Python is similar except it’s typically a colon, line break, then indent.
What I have learned is: If the code is indented too deeply, it’s a code problem, not the language.
Too much nested code was likely part of the problem, but not being able to easily tell where a block of coded ended without seeing the top of the block made it difficult to work with.
That’s fair! Takes time to get used to. Modern editors make this easier by highlighting the current indent level, or can even make the top X lines of the current closure “stick” to the top of the editor for those really long blocks.
Having those features would really have made it easier. I have only ever written my python code in Sublime Text. While it is a sublime text editor, at is not ideal (compared to how it is to write Java in IntelliJ) for Python. (Maybe with addons but I never delved into that more than a few.)
It’s because there is no clear indication of where a block ends.
Here is some sample code. I find it difficult to tell how many indentations I have or where I need to write if I want to continue at a certain level.
import time
import aiohttp
"""
Retreives the data from RSS URL and return the status codes as well as the data. Return -1 if something went wrong.
"""asyncdefget_rss_feed(rss_url):
asyncwith aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
try:
retry_count = 0while retry_count < 5:
asyncwith session.get(rss_url) as resp:
if resp.status == 200:
return {'status': resp.status, 'data': await resp.text()}
else:
retry_count += 1
time.sleep(60)
if retry_count == 5:
raise ValueError('To many failed connection attempts', retry_count)
except aiohttp.InvalidURL as error:
return {'status': -1, 'data': f"Error: {rss_url} is not a valid URL.", 'error': error}
except aiohttp.ClientConnectorError as error:
return {'status': -1, 'data': f"Error: Could not connect to {rss_url}.", 'error': error}
except ValueError as error:
return {'status': -1, 'data': f"Error: Could not connect to {rss_url} after {retry_count} attempts.", 'error': error}
its just not as clear especially when u are indenting stuff inside stuff with a bunch of conditions everywhere its hard to read just from indentation, and with the () or {} u can just click on it and most text editors will show u from where to where its going.
Yeah but due to the extra indentation in the second image, the python part doesn’t work.
deleted by creator
I’ve been coding around 25 years and got my start in perl. I absolutely hated python when I first used it. I use it all the time now. I still prefer my curly braces but I don’t have any trouble with python or mind the whitespace anymore. I just run it through ruff every save. I do the same with go everything goes through gofumpt. I really think a lot of it is a generational thing. Older people are just used to curly brackets.
I do get peoples complaints about the packaging. Unless you’re a dev already it’s a bit extra to deal with shuffling virtual environments because the system python environments almost never work out of the box, at least in the last few distros I’ve used. Once I adjusted though it’s no problem. I run half my dev stuff in toolboxes with their own environment anyway.
I once wrote a bot in python tdownloaded a ical file, looked for chances and informed me if found. The space indentation made it hell to follow the code in my opinion.
Just curious, what about spaces made it hard? What language would have been easier? In curly brace languages, 99% of the time, a curly brace is followed by a line break and an indent. Python is similar except it’s typically a colon, line break, then indent.
What I have learned is: If the code is indented too deeply, it’s a code problem, not the language.
Torvalds infamously wrote:
Too much nested code was likely part of the problem, but not being able to easily tell where a block of coded ended without seeing the top of the block made it difficult to work with.
That’s fair! Takes time to get used to. Modern editors make this easier by highlighting the current indent level, or can even make the top X lines of the current closure “stick” to the top of the editor for those really long blocks.
Having those features would really have made it easier. I have only ever written my python code in Sublime Text. While it is a sublime text editor, at is not ideal (compared to how it is to write Java in IntelliJ) for Python. (Maybe with addons but I never delved into that more than a few.)
I don’t get it because my phyton code is indented exactly the same as all my other code. Each block of code one tab in/out, how else would you do it?
It’s because there is no clear indication of where a block ends.
Here is some sample code. I find it difficult to tell how many indentations I have or where I need to write if I want to continue at a certain level.
import time import aiohttp """ Retreives the data from RSS URL and return the status codes as well as the data. Return -1 if something went wrong. """ async def get_rss_feed(rss_url): async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session: try: retry_count = 0 while retry_count < 5: async with session.get(rss_url) as resp: if resp.status == 200: return {'status': resp.status, 'data': await resp.text()} else: retry_count += 1 time.sleep(60) if retry_count == 5: raise ValueError('To many failed connection attempts', retry_count) except aiohttp.InvalidURL as error: return {'status': -1, 'data': f"Error: {rss_url} is not a valid URL.", 'error': error} except aiohttp.ClientConnectorError as error: return {'status': -1, 'data': f"Error: Could not connect to {rss_url}.", 'error': error} except ValueError as error: return {'status': -1, 'data': f"Error: Could not connect to {rss_url} after {retry_count} attempts.", 'error': error}its just not as clear especially when u are indenting stuff inside stuff with a bunch of conditions everywhere its hard to read just from indentation, and with the () or {} u can just click on it and most text editors will show u from where to where its going.
That’s an anti pattern in basically every language though. The fix is to simplify those conditionals, not use a curly-bracketed language.