Coding style article with interesting section on white space

[Michael Tobis]

(unwisely taking the bait...)

If you like your language to look like this
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~szymansk/OOF90/bugs.html
then more power to you.

I prefer my languages to be portable, terse and expressive. That's why
I like Python. If you want your language to be obscure, ill-defined and
inconsistent across platforms, by all means go to comp.lang.fortran .

There is no fundamental reason why a language with expressive power
much like Python's cannot have run-time performance comparable to
Fortran's. Unfortunately, Fortran's dominance of the relatively small
scientific computation universe has prevented such a language from
emerging. The solutions which interest me in the short run are 1)
writing a code generation layer from Python to a compiled language
(possibly F77 though I will try to get away with C) and 2) wrapping
legacy Fortran in Python. The latter is quite regularly subverted by
non-standard binary data structures across compilers and a pretty
profound disinterest in interoperability by the people designing the
Fortran standard that makes their interest look more like turf
protection and less like an interest in the progress of science.

In the long run, hopefully a high-performance language that has
significant capacity for abstraction and introspection will emerge.
People keep trying various ways to coax Python into that role. Maybe it
will work, or maybe a fresh start is needed. Awkwardly bolting even
more conetmporary concepts onto Fortran is not going to achieve
bringing computational science up to date.

Python fundamentally respects the programmer. Fortran started from a
point of respecting only the machine, (which is why Fortrans up to F77,
having a well-defined objective, were reasonable) but now it is a
motley collection of half-baked and confusing compromises between
runtime performance, backward compatibility,  and awkward efforts at
keeping up with trends in computer languages. So-called "object
oriented Fortran" makes the most baroque Java look elegant and
expressive.

For more see http://www.fortranstatement.com
Language matters. You can't really write Python in any language. 

mt