Praise for Python

Sometimes, I come accross something which I really wish I could have written. Usually, I just smile, try to commit it to memory, and move on. This time, I have to quote what Jim Roskind wrote on Guido's blog:

I was initially a bit put off by the Python indentation approach (I was a grammar guy… and got used to parsing braces and parens, and didn’t like the idea of white space having so much meaning), but I soon came to love it. Eventually I came to apply one of my favorite computer science sayings to Python as an endorsement to their indentation blocking approach: “The fundamental evil in computer science is the replication of code or data.” In almost all languages I had previously worked, the indentation of code had always been a critical PART of program nesting structure (at least for the reader). As I read and wrote more Python, its use of indentation as the ONLY way to specify blocks began to look better and better. All the silly bugs related to indentation errors (misleading the human reader) were gone in Python. The redundant use in other languages of braces AS WELL AS indentation (the former to help the parser, and the latter to help the human reader) was an effective duplication of the author’s intent. That duplication in other languages, a fundamental original sin, was missing in Python. It was cool! ;-)

Yes, indeed. Python is cool. :-)