Whitespace as syntax (was Re: Python Rocks!)

Thomas Hamelryck thamelry at vub.ac.be
Wed Feb 9 04:15:44 EST 2000


Paul Prescod <paul at prescod.net> wrote:

: If it takes more than fifteen minutes to retrain the eyes from the old
: language to the new language, most programmers will never make the jump.
: Why would they, when there are already too many languages to learn that
: do not demand eyeball retraining?

Because eyeball retraining can be worth it sometimes. Besides, it did not stop
Perl from becoming extremely popular. It also takes more than 15 minutes to get
used to indentation in Pyton (this regardless whether you start to like it or not). 

I never seriously tried out smalltalk because I could not get a good free smalltalk
implementation, not because of its weird syntax. I still miss a lot of functionality 
in Squeak, but if that is added I will certainly give it a go. 

Cheers,

---
Thomas Hamelryck    Institute of Molecular and Structural Biology
Aarhus University   Gustav Wieds Vej 10C
DK-8000 Aarhus C    Denmark                



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