Guido sees the light: PEP 8 updated

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 6:09 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Now, descending back on earth, I don't believe the advantages of rich
> source code will outweigh those of plain text in the foreseeable future.

No, they will not, because they'll make your code proprietary.
Suddenly *nothing* else will viably work with your code. (And before
you say "but diff tools are fine with XML/JSON/YAML/whatever", it's
not that simple; as soon as the underlying structure is capable of
representing information that doesn't matter to your source code, you
open yourself up to diff noise. I've had this exact problem with
git-managing my OBS configs, which are JSON files; there's one
particular array that's effectively a set, and the file keeps
reordering itself. I had to write a pre-commit script that sorts them
into a consistent order, else I'd have had useless diffs.)

Of course, there's no such thing as "plain text". Encodings will
always bite you. But if you can depend on all files being (a) binary,
(b) UTF-8, or (c) tagged with a coding cookie, it's not too hard to
work with other people's files.

ChrisA