this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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You can work around most issues in any language with the right tools. That's not the point.
If a design decision introduced a whole new class of errors it is probably just bad design.
It's a choice, do you want to deal with brackets or indents? Pick one
It also greatly improved readability of the language. Since switching to the standard of using 4-space tabs, I've not had any problems except when dredging up someone's old Python 2 code.
You can create some really ugly code in spite of the forced indentation in python. Indentation does not really help here at all. In all languages you can correctly or incorrectly format things. A code formatter strictly applying a coding standard helps far more here than indents vs bracers. Take a look at black it takes the pep8 standards and adds more strict things on top making code look a lot more consistent and thus makes it easier to read.
And all formatters will indent code consistently, so having it as part of the language parser does not really help improve readability at all. And even without a formatter everyone I know will still correctly indent their code no matter the language used. But sometimes forcing new lines to have a meaning does make things worst - just look at pythons lambdas which have to be a single line.
Indentations does not really help readability that much in case of really, really, long code, and in some cases, a code can execute without with unexpected result because of one single indentation being off. Both of these why I like things like curly braces/brackets and terminators like endif/fi/done/end/etc. But, at the end of the day, if there's a readability problem, then that's a sign that the code needs to be reworked on.
Oh I think indentation helps a ton with readability. Even for bad, long or otherwise hard to read code - it would be way, way worst with no or wrong indentation. Correct indentation helps a lot. It is not the only thing that can be done to improve readability but it is the first and simplest fix you can apply to a code base. So a language enforcing it with syntax does not matter when even basic text editors can correctly and automatically indent your code.
Though one thing I do like about bracers is I can be lazy with formatting and let my formatter sort it out for me on save. With a white space sensitive language you need to get it correct from the start or else the program just does the wrong thing.
I didn't say it doesn't help. But, it alone does not really help for bad and long code, but you are correct in that it would be worse with the wrong indentation. Like you pointed out, the program could do the wrong thing if there is a wrong indentation where indentation matters which is one of my issue with something like Python. And languages with explicit exit scope tend to not have that issue while adding to the benefit of making longer code readable. Where white-space sensitive languages really shine on in my opinion are small codes, and that's where I think of using Python.
Indentation can be wrong, but braces can't?
Braces too can be wrong. But, one is less likely to get it wrong. Modern editors often allows one to highlight matching braces immediately after selection, and rainbow braces(if available) makes it clear on the nest level.