[Gambas-user] Locale message (offtopic)

[Tobias Boege]

On Wed, 08 Jul 2020, Jussi Lahtinen wrote:
> > How can be gambas be taken as a serious programming language by seeing
> > all that messy code spreading everywhere?
> >
> 
> If that would be an issue, then no one would take C seriously.
> 

Well, it might be a trade-off between utility (also consider prevalence)
and suffering from using it, and C is a net positive.

I think Jesus has a point.  I've seen it countless times in forums, that
people reflexively equate "(sample of) source code is unreadable or badly
formatted" with "the language has no technical merits".  Yes, something
might be said about the correlation of technical merit and having a high
proportion of professionally trained users of the language (as determined
by how disciplined their source code looks??), but that isn't nearly as
clear as people pretend it to be.  The language and its standard library
are not guilty by association with amateur users.  It is my humble opinion
that syntax and readability concerns are for most commentators simply a
matter of first impression sympathy allowing them to hand-wavingly dismiss
something without spending time to evaluate it on hard criteria.

This is an easy position for me to take because I really like Perl and
I say that syntax is a very shallow reason for people to avoid it.

And I do know Gambas and there are a bunch of reasons why it is not the
default choice for my everyday programming, but syntax isn't one of them
and it wouldn't get on the list even if indentation became mandatory.

Although I'll admit that I never bothered to learn how exactly I am allowed
to linebreak long expressions in Python or if I am in fact allowed to program
"in paragraphs", with empty lines between blocks or if I have to indent them
to the current level and reconfigure my editor not to mark that as useless
trailing whitespace.  I did produce some horrible, unreadable Python code that
hopefully only 5 people ever saw, keeping Python's reputation unsullied ;-)

Regards,
Tobi

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk