From: Eric Lee Green <eric@...>
Date: 2001-10-25T05:00:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23220] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby

On Wednesday 24 October 2001 12:12, Sean Russell wrote:
> I disagree.  With Python, the coding standards are inflexible.  Python is
> not going to change; you have no chance to provide input; control of the
> style is so far removed from you that you are, in effect, insignificant.
> If control is local, you have input.  It may be ignored; you may be
> outvoted; it may be such a legacy standard that changing it would be
> impossible.  This is still at the *worst case* no worse off than if you
> were using Python, and the opportunity for it being *better* is much, much
> greater.

In my experience, it doesn't matter what the coding standard is. What matters 
is that it is consistently followed. In the 100K+ line Python project there 
were a large number of things that we had as part of our coding standard that 
were not enforced by the language, things such as naming conventions for 
modules, classes, methods and attributes, use of spaces rather than tabs for 
indentation, use of 'pass' to close blocks so Emacs's Python mode would not 
obfuscate our code for us, etc... all that Python's stylistic limitations did 
was remove a few things from that coding standard. 

And yes, there were a few people flogged with limp spaghetti when they did 
not follow the coding standard :-). As co-lead I was responsible for much of 
the integration portion, meaning I ended up tracking bugs down into other 
people's code... needless to say it irritated me when I had to re-format 
somebody's code because he had not followed the coding standard! 

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
           mailto:eric@badtux.org  Web: http://www.badtux.org
             You do not save freedom by destroying freedom