Joel on Python: "I'm sure most programmers consider this [semantically meaningful indentation] to be frighteningly annoying, but most programmers are wrong. Giving indentation semantic meaning is a stroke of genius. In one fell swoop, it forces code to be indented neatly and correctly, while avoiding an entire class of bugs caused by code that looks like it's doing X when it's really doing Y and averting a whole class of worthless flamewars."
Python is full of strokes of genius; this is merely one of the most obvious, in-your-face examples.
Joel also says that he doesn't have the time to learn Python. But then, elsewhere, he says that he uses VB for scripting!
Joel - really, you can't afford not to learn Python!
Posted to Python by Simon Brunning at March 16, 2004 02:04 PMJoel *created* VB:
http://joel.spolsky.com/resume.htm
I think what he did was to embed VB into Excel as its macro language. Which is a whole lot cleverer than anything *I* could do, I must say.
Nevertheless, I don't think that we can lay the blame for VB *wholy* at Joel's door. ;-)
Posted by: Simon Brunning on March 17, 2004 09:10 AM> Joel *created* VB
Interestingly enough, Alan Cooper created it a couple of years before Joel created it:
http://www.apress.com/vbat10/essay.html?eID=AlanCooper
(But you cannot really blame him for VB, either. He used Ruby ;-)
Posted by: Fredrik Lundh on March 17, 2004 10:54 AM...that's what I get for failing to Google properly...
Posted by: Sam Penrose on March 18, 2004 12:33 AM