I’ve been getting into Python lately (the language, not the comedy troupe or the snake). I must say that I’m not a big fan.

(Programmer rant follows)

If you’ve never used it, it’s a lot like BASIC, but is a PITA about whitespace. Now I am all for proper formatting of code, and am quite a sticker for it in my C++ and Java projects. However, white space should be for formatting only and not be a syntax element. One missed indentation, and not only does your program not work but you have a very hard to find bug where the body of your loop had just been cut in half. This also makes cut and pasting blocks of code much more difficult.

Also why no block comments? Block comments are one of the best ways to search for bugs by temporarily removing large chunks of code. Very time consuming with the single line comments. Any what’s with the ‘for’ statement only handling lists? This completely messes up iterators that use ‘break’ and ‘continue’.

I just don’t see what the big appeal is with this language. Sure, making sure your code is nicely formatted is a very useful thing to do. But you shouldn’t force this to happen by sabotaging the language.