this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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You can work around most issues in any language with the right tools. That's not the point.
If a design decision introduced a whole new class of errors it is probably just bad design.
It also greatly improved readability of the language. Since switching to the standard of using 4-space tabs, I've not had any problems except when dredging up someone's old Python 2 code.
You can create some really ugly code in spite of the forced indentation in python. Indentation does not really help here at all. In all languages you can correctly or incorrectly format things. A code formatter strictly applying a coding standard helps far more here than indents vs bracers. Take a look at black it takes the pep8 standards and adds more strict things on top making code look a lot more consistent and thus makes it easier to read.
And all formatters will indent code consistently, so having it as part of the language parser does not really help improve readability at all. And even without a formatter everyone I know will still correctly indent their code no matter the language used. But sometimes forcing new lines to have a meaning does make things worst - just look at pythons lambdas which have to be a single line.
Indentations does not really help readability that much in case of really, really, long code, and in some cases, a code can execute without with unexpected result because of one single indentation being off. Both of these why I like things like curly braces/brackets and terminators like endif/fi/done/end/etc. But, at the end of the day, if there's a readability problem, then that's a sign that the code needs to be reworked on.
Indentation can be wrong, but braces can't?
Oh I think indentation helps a ton with readability. Even for bad, long or otherwise hard to read code - it would be way, way worst with no or wrong indentation. Correct indentation helps a lot. It is not the only thing that can be done to improve readability but it is the first and simplest fix you can apply to a code base. So a language enforcing it with syntax does not matter when even basic text editors can correctly and automatically indent your code.
Though one thing I do like about bracers is I can be lazy with formatting and let my formatter sort it out for me on save. With a white space sensitive language you need to get it correct from the start or else the program just does the wrong thing.