Question

C++ is my first language, and as such I’m used to whitespace being ignored. However, I’ve been toying around with Python, and I don’t find it too hard to get used to the whitespace rules. It seems, however, that a lot of programmers on the Internet can’t get past the whitespace rules. From what I’ve seen, peoples’ C++ programs tend to be formatted very consistently with respect to whitespace (or else it’s pretty hard to read), so why do some people have such a problem with whitespace-based languages like Python?

Answer 1

Perhaps your C++ background (and thus who your peers are) is clouding your perception of this (ie selective sampling) but in my experience the reaction to Python’s “white space is intent” meme is anywhere from ambivalent to they absolutely love it. The reason a lot of people love it is that it forces people to format their code.

I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone who “hates” it because hating it is much like hating the idea of well-formatted code.

Edit: let me put this in some perspective.

In the Java world there are two main methods of packaging and deploying Web apps: Ant and Maven.

Ant is basically an XML-based Make facility that has tasks for the common things you do. It’s a blank slate, which is powerful, but it also means you have to write a lot of common things yourself and every installation is free to do things slightly differently. All of this is well-intentioned but can make it hard to figure out someone’s Ant scripts.

Maven is far more fully features. It has archetypes, which are basically project types. Depending on which archetype(s) you use, you won’t have to write any tasks to start, stop, clean, build, etc but you will have a mandated directory structure, which is quite deep.

The advantage of that is if you’ve seen one Maven Web app you’ve seen them all. You know the commands. You know the structure. That’s extremely useful.

But you have people who absolutely hate Maven and I think it comes down to this: they don’t like giving up control, even when it’s ultimately in their interest to do so. Also, you’ll find a certain brand of person who thinks that their use case is a justifiable exception. You see this personality trait a lot. For example, I think an old Joel post mentioned a story where someone wanted to use “enter” to go from the username to password form fields even though the convention was that enter executed the default action (usually “OK”) so they had to write a custom dialog class for Windows for this.

Basically some people just don’t like being told what to do and others are completely obstinate in their belief that they’re right even when all evidence points to the contrary.

This probably explains why some supposedly hate Python’s white space: they don’t like being told how to format their code. They like the freedom of C/C++.