merits of Lisp vs Python

[greg]

josephoswaldgg at hotmail.com wrote:
> I wrote my first Python in a non-Python-aware editor, and somehow had
> swapped tabs and spaces; when I moved it to IDLE---the indentation
> *looked fine* but was invisibly weird.

That can admittedly be a problem. It would help if the
parser complained by default about mixed use of tabs and
spaces in a single file, instead of silently assuming tab
stops every 8 spaces (an historical misfeature that we still
have for the time being). Probably this will change in
Python 3.0.

Personally I find Python pleasant enough to work with
that I'm willing to put up with the odd screwup like that
happening now and then. And they really don't happen all
that often -- once you've experienced it a few times,
you learn how to guard against it and get better at
fixing it when it does happen.

 > I will even admit that white-space significance does not
> materially increase errors among experienced Pythonistas. What it isn't
> is some kind of miraculous invention that saves programmers from ever
> making mistakes that are common in other languages,

We don't claim that -- only that it's not the unmitigated
disaster than some people assume it will be without ever
having tried it.

--
Greg