Larry Wall's comment on python...

[Kow Kuroda]

On Saturday, September 7, 2002, at 07:51 PM, Peter Hansen wrote:

> Gib Bogle wrote:
>> Peter Hansen wrote:
>>> mmaddox at hcsmail.com wrote:
>>>> You must agree
>>>> that Python can lead you to horizontal scrolling in your editor - the 
>>>> bane
>>>> of user interface design.
>>>
>>> I definitely don't understand how Python, more or less than any other
>>> language, leads to more horizontal scrolling.
>> Maybe he is referring to an effect of default editor tab size.
>
> Apparently not, according to an email, which just said that
> Python leads one to do this more than with other languages.
>
> My point is that indentation (the way I've done it anyway) looks
> *exactly* the same in C, Pascal, Python, or any other block-structured
> language, so I still have no idea why Python would feel any different
> in this respect for someone.

Abstractly, you're completely right, but I guess people like Larry Wall, if 
he really meant what his words meant anyway, are expecting certain *tokens*
, or rather *markers*, that make and/or help them *see* the abstract 
structures called "blocks" in this case.

More interestingly, Python's lack of block-marking device (or Guido's 
refusal to make use of it in Python) is another piece of evidence that 
Python is more *abstract* than languages like C.

My best guess is that people like Larry are kind of detail-fetishists who 
don't really like this kind of abstractness.

Kow