2 Feb
2022
2 Feb
'22
5:12 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 4:33 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
My disagreement with them using scripting (python) as
step one is the lack
of teaching data typing early
Teaching types is very important. But Python is strongly typed: a string
is not a number is not a hashtable. When it's important for performance
reasons or consistency across a large codebase, you can add static type
information to your Python code without overloading n00b brains with
mandatory type annotations.
AND python's silly use space/tabs to set up structure instead of real {}
or B/E blocks.
Nobody would accept code that was incorrectly indented (although some
languages have more than one indentation convention, like C) in an
assignment or pull request. And when looking at correct or mostly correct
code, we look at the indentation structure, not the braces. That being so,
having both braces and indentation is fundamentally a DRY violation.
Automatic data conversion has never been a good idea in my experience
because like many things that happen magically, it
almost never works as
I expect.
I think it was a customer revolt that persuaded IBM to add "mixed-mode"
expressions like "A + I" to Fortran IV; they had been disallowed in Fortran
II. I haven't heard anyone saying we ought to revert that change.