/prague/ Q&A

Ask /prog/ anything.

Although don't expect an answer or even a good one.

Also, keep it /prog/ related.

>>95
"People hate Python because of forced indentation" has got to be one of the biggest strawmans in programming history, but it is a perfect summary of the Python community, which will ignore any real issue the language suffers from.

I personally dislike Python because it has ridiculous flaws a proper language shouldn't have to deal with. Scoping issues in 2013? List comprehensions with messy semantics in favor of clean higher-order functions? Why is self a thing? Why is nonlocal/global a thing? If forced indentation is so good, why do you have to introduce noops like pass in order to have an empty block? It should be obvious it's empty from the indentation, no? The same thing goes for the colon after each statement. What's the point? Python also lacks a numerical tower, which doesn't go well with the whole "errors only show up when they actually happen" thing you can attribute to Python's lack of static typing and overly dynamic nature - have fun hunting silent errors. Finally, it doesn't offer anything new; there is no feature specific to Python that would make me ignore these flaws for the time being. It's yet another scripting language with no redeeming feature, a ton of flaws, and a poisonous community that suffers from guru worship (a sign that the community is incompetent, similar behavior can be observed in Clojure and C++) and refuses to fix these language flaws.

The list could actually go on, but I don't want to write yet another essay on why Python is "teh suck". Long story short: Indentation is its smallest problem.