[lug] Running a mixed Python environment

[Jeffrey S. Haemer]

Jed,

My first UNIX (as it used to be spelled) job was in late 1983, at the Estes
Park office of INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation. I got to work with Dave
Taenzer for Ned Irons, an unstoppable language tinkerer. The language Ned
had invented, to make little applications for his User Interface Management
System, TEN/PLUS, had significant whitespace, just like Python.

The programmers (as we used to call ourselves) in the other ISC offices all
hated it because of that.

I still think they were, arguably, wrong. Some time around 1982, I read a
study in SIGPLAN notices, a now-defunct pub of the ACM, by someone who'd
hunted through huge bodies of code (FORTRAN? PL/1? PASCAL? I forget.) for
cases where indentation didn't match control-flow.  In almost every case,
the indentation was right, the bracing/keywords/whatever, wrong.

Humans are better at indenting than bracing.

Ned just took that and ran with it. So, eventually, did Guido.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 7:17 AM Jed S. Baer <blug at jbaer.cotse.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Sep 2020 07:10:26 -0600
> Jeffrey S. Haemer wrote:
>
> > *The
> > Unix-Haters Handbook
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook>* said "using
> tabs
> > as part of the syntax is like one of those pungee stick traps in *The
> > Green Berets*
>
> My initial reaction to having whitespace be significant, in Python, was
> along those lines. :)
>
> --
> All operating systems suck, but Linux just sucks less
>  - Linus Torvalds
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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>   720-837-8908 [cell]
*פרייהייט? דאס איז יאַנג דינען וואָרט!*
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