Waffling between Python and Ruby

[Warren Postma]

> Indulge my curiosity - how many times has this actually happened in
> your six months of using Python?

I admit that using a proper editor helps. When using IDLE, or PythonWin, it
NEVER happens.

Nevertheless, I have been forced at various times to use Visual Studio, or
Some Editor That Was Around At The Time, for Python use, and it has bitten
me more than a few times.   I don't know an exact number, but let's say
about 25 times.

That's really not the point though, and I know it.

Really it's about the psychological damage done to me long ago by other less
humane languages and tools.

The lingering memory of COBOL and Fortran, as well as some horrible
incidents involving Makefiles, have given me the cold shivers with respect
to whitespace and indentation.

Accidental Complexity my ass. It's a conspiracy! ;-)  Perhaps COBOL and
Fortran and Makefiles were cruel experiments, foisted upon me by the Smoking
Man, and the other X-Files Illuminati.  There has been permanent damage done
to my brain by these three horrid tools.  All were forced upon me, a naieve
computer science student. The effects can never be repaired.

I still see the schizophrenia that resulted from this trauma in myself, and
in other programmers.  For example:

I have many developers in my office who would cry more loudly than I about
Python's "required indentation", and yet these same developers are always
telling me that all our company's programmers should tab and indent their
code the same way,
for "readability".   Few can see the contradiction there.

I'm with Python on this one, at the end of the day, but I'll still whine
about it when I get stuck with using a lame editor.

A strict indentation scheme is ideally intended to be used with editors that
can help a little bit.

Warren