do people really complain about significant whitespace?

[gslindstrom at gmail.com]

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.

Some of it may be a reaction from "old-timers" who remember FORTRAN,
where (if memory serves), code had to start in column 16 and code
continutations had to be an asterik in column 72 (it's been many years
since I've done any work in FORTRAN, but you get the idea)

Or it may be a reaction from Assembler, which is also quite
column-centric (is Assembler still taught in schools??).

But most likely, it's different.  It's easier to complain about things
than to actually check them out.  Recently I had a friend tell me that
they absolutely hated a certain tv personality/author.  When I asked if
they had ever watched the person or read one of their books, they said
"Why should I?  I hate them!!".  I think the same attitude comes into
play with computer languages.

One more thing.  I have many friends that love to program Perl.
Without bashing the language, I find it ironic when they say "There's
more than one way to do it" but inisit that I should be using Perl
while they quote Python as "There's only one way to do it" though
(most) Python coders I know are fairly comforatble dealing with
multiple languages.

--greg