[Gambas-user] Locale message (offtopic)

[Jussi Lahtinen]

Well, missing/bad indentation can be corrected by single click (*if* it is
not part of syntax). But it doesn't make bad code good or change the user
base. I think the fact that language is easy to use/learn attracts
amateurs, independently of indentation issue.
Thus I don't think indentation is a real issue with languages such as
Gambas.


Jussi

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 3:02 AM Tobias Boege <taboege at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> ----[ http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/netiquette ]----
>
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