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[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 03 Nov 2010 18:49:06 +0000, Tim Harig wrote:

>> Actually I agree with you about tabs. I think tabs are far more logical
>> and sensible. But I'm stuck with broken tools that don't deal with
>> tabs,
> 
> Where you not the one a few posts back telling Seebs that he needed to
> change his broken tools?

Yes, and I also said that I sympathized with him if he couldn't.

 
>>> It is a big mistake that whenever the issue arises, the community
>>> effectively attacks anybody who might have disagreements with the
>>> tradeoffs made for the Python language.  This tends to set people on
>>> the defensive and gives them a bad taste about the language as a
>>> whole.
>>
>> That's very insightful. Why don't you apply some of that insight to the
>> other side? It is *incredibly* annoying to see the same old people
>> making the same old snide remarks about the same old issues over and
>> over again, particularly when:
> 
> A large part of the reason that the issue keeps coming up is that the
> community never really deals with it when it does.

No. The community does deal with it. It deals with it by saying "It isn't 
going to change." If you want a language that forces you to wrap ever 
block in BEGIN END tags, you have a thousand choices. Python is not one 
of them. What is so hard to understand about this?


> I have enough
> customer support experience to know that a client is never really
> satisfied until you acknowledge their problem.  Until the problem is
> acknowledged, the client will have put up psychological communcation
> block that prevents them from hearing any workarounds that you might
> have.

Yes, well that too goes both ways. *I* have a psychological communication 
block that prevents me from hearing any complaints about the lack of 
braces from people who refuse to acknowledge that having to type braces 
is stupid and annoying, and that the use of braces in a language hurts 
readability.

Frankly, I DON'T CARE how often your editor breaks your source code. I 
don't care about Seeb's mail server that converts his Python code to 
HTML. I don't give a rat's arse about how many times some buggy ftp 
client has mangled the indentation on Python files. Not my problem. Your 
pain is not my pain, and any solution to these problems that involves 
changing the way I read and write Python code is an anti-solution to a 
non-problem to me.

Until the "Python is broken 'cos it has no braces" crowd acknowledge this 
fact, I just harden my heart against their complaints. Why should *I* 
have to acknowledge their issues when they don't acknowledge mine?



-- 
Steven