From: J Haas <Myrdred@...>
Date: 2009-05-29T05:15:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Pythonic indentation (or: beating a dead horse)

On May 28, 12:51 pm, James Britt <james.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW, one thing about these sort of threads that puzzles me is why, given
> the amazing choice of programming languages, do people push, for
> example, to have Ruby be like Python,  when Python exists?  And do these
> same people also go on Python lists and argue to make Python more like Ruby?

This puzzles you? This really, really puzzles you? Truly?

Then I'll try to explain.

Python is not merely Ruby with syntactic indentation. If it were,
you'd be absolutely correct and my complaint would be redundant, and
"switch to Python" would be good advice. But it's not. There are some
parts of Ruby that are better than Python, and if I switched to
Python, I'd have to give those up. There are also some parts of Python
that are better than Ruby, and switching to Ruby means giving them up.

Ruby is imperfect and could be improved, and before you recoil in
horror, it's no sacrilege to say so. As an engineer all I care about
is having the best tools for the job, and as such I'd rather work to
_improve_ an imperfect tool than abandon it for another tool which is
just as imperfect (or moreso) but in a different way.