OT: This Swift thing

[Michael Torrie]

On 06/03/2014 03:49 PM, Mark H Harris wrote:
> I have been engaged in a minor flame debate (locally) over block 
> delimiters (or lack thereof) which I'm loosing. Locally, people hate 
> python's indentation block delimiting, and wish python would adopt curly 
> braces. 

Yeah people do have strong opinions.  But regardless of those opinions,
a programmer who continually tries to fight the programming language (no
matter what language that is) is going to end up with low productivity
and probably bad code.  I may despise Java, but if my employer required
me to use it on a project, I need stop fighting the language and learn
to work with it and take advantage of it.  Also programmers who insist
on bringing certain paradigms and baggage with them from other languages
are going to really suffer I think.  For example, trying to program in a
Java style in Python is going to cause problems.  Back in uni I saw that
a lot with people trying to code in C++ using Javaisms.  (Hmm, I see a
pattern here... we can blame it all on Java.)

In any event, I confess I don't understand people who despise Python's
block style.  Do programmers not psuedo-code on paper or white boards
anymore?  If so, then we've definitely lost something.  That Python is
executable pseudo-code really appealed to me early on.