do people really complain about significant whitespace?

[crystalattice]

infidel wrote:
> Where are they-who-hate-us-for-our-whitespace?  Are "they" really that
> stupid/petty?  Are "they" really out there at all?  "They" almost sound
> like a mythical caste of tasteless heathens that "we" have invented.
> It just sounds like so much trivial nitpickery that it's hard to
> believe it's as common as we've come to believe.

Actually, some of the guys I work with complained about Python when
they first had to learn it for our Zope server.  One of them is an
old-school Unix guy who spent the last 20+ years doing procedural
languages with funky syntax, like C.  The other one is a VB.NET junkie
who I don't think has much experience outside of MS languages, except
maybe Java.

One of the complaints they had for the first few weeks was the white
space issue and the fact Python doesn't have brackets or semicolons.
Obviously they learned to "deal with it" but they sure made it seem
like it was a painful transition.  I think the biggest pain was the
fact that they are forced to indent their code now so they can't be
lazy anymore.