How coding in Python is bad for you

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 3:21 AM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:51 AM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>>> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>>> <snip>
>>>> ... I teach JavaScript as well as Python, and I've seen some
>>>> pretty horrendous indentation flaws (examples available if people ask
>>>> privately, but I will anonymize them because I'm not here to shame
>>>> students) - but there have been nearly as many cases where the
>>>> indentation's fine and the bracket nesting isn't.
>>>
>>> Can I ask what editor(s) your students have available?  I ask because
>>> I've not given a moment's thought to indentation or what bracket matches
>>> what for decades due to having a helpful editor.
>>>
>>
>> Quite a few, depending on which platform they're using. I'd say
>> Sublime is the most common choice.
>
> So what's going in your opinion?  The errors are in the group who don't
> use the right tools or what?

In my opinion, what's going on is that exploring code is a messy
process, and that the more little finicky things you have to get
right, the more likely you'll get something wrong. Which one you get
wrong is pretty much arbitrary.

Getting indentation wrong in JS won't affect the interpreter, but it
majorly affects the human. Which one would you rather confuse?

ChrisA