I've really never understood where this aesthetic preference comes from.
Back when most of my code was in C or C++ (or Java), I was told all the time, sure you can omit these braces for a single-statement block, but you shouldn't, you'll regret it later. You can leave all the code unindented or irregularly indented, it won't matter to the compiler, but you'll appreciate lining it up in the long run. And all that advice was correct; I was better off in the long run, and I saw others come to regret it all the time. But then, over time, I started to wonder why I had to scan past all these diagonal lines of close braces as I read the code. And I cursed that these languages made it too difficult to pull out the inner parts into separate functions, disentangle setup and teardown from the main loop etc. But I also cursed that after putting in the effort (even if was just "using a proper text editor") to make things line up beautifully and in agreement with the logical structure, I still had to take up vertical space with these redundant markers of the logical structure.
Python was my first language using significant whitespace, and it was a breath of fresh air. That was a bit over 20 years ago, I think. I've learned several other programming languages since then, but I never "looked back" in any meaningful way.
Every time I copy paste something in python I have to check the whitespace. Often there's a problem that needs fixing, like the first line indented differently, or everything is off. Sometimes I'm not paying perfect attention and get hard to catch bugs.
I'm now certain that significant whitespace is simply wrong.
Significant whitespace pushes a tooling problem (correct indentation) into the human domain. It might have made sense before autoformatters that run on save, but I agree with you that in today's languages, it's a net negative.
As far as I'm aware, none of the new languages that have seen success in the last ten years (Go, Rust, Swift, Dart, Kotlin) rely on the author to format code correctly - instead, they do it for you. And that's good! That's one less thing the programmer has to worry about!
> Significant whitespace pushes a tooling problem (correct indentation) into the human domain. It might have made sense before autoformatters that run on save, but I agree with you that in today's languages, it's a net negative.
Sorry, I don't follow. There's nothing preventing a tool from re-indenting code when it's pasted (i.e.: considering indentation within the pasted text relative to its first line, and then applying an indentation offset according to where it's pasted), and many already do. It's the same kind of logic that's used to auto-format code in braced languages; arguably simpler unless it's also validating the existing indentation of the pasted text.
And actually, who even is relying on "autoformatters that run on save"? I want the code to look right as I'm writing it, not after. The tools you describe are, to me, about maintaining project standards when multiple people are involved, but fundamentally each person is still making the code look locally, personally right before saving (or committing, since these things are also often done with pre-commit hooks). I can't imagine just typing out whatever slop is syntactically correct and waiting to save the file to fix it. Not when I have a proper text editor that facilitates typing it out the way I want it, taking advantage of awareness of the language syntax.
> none of the new languages that have seen success in the last ten years (Go, Rust, Swift, Dart, Kotlin) rely on the author to format code correctly - instead, they do it for you.
Languages do not and cannot format code. Text editors (including the ones built into IDEs) do. If I type a } and the text changes position, it's not the programming language that did this.
And this is also not better in braced languages. Just as I can input a } on a new line in Vim in a braced language and have it dedent, if I want to write more code in Python that's outside the block, I just press the backspace key and it removes an entire level of indentation. And then I start typing that code, and I don't have to input a newline because I'm already on the line where I want the code to be, because I'm not expected to have a } on a separate line from everything else.
> Sorry, I don't follow. There's nothing preventing a tool from re-indenting code when it's pasted (i.e.: considering indentation within the pasted text relative to its first line, and then applying an indentation offset according to where it's pasted), and many already do. It's the same kind of logic that's used to auto-format code in braced languages; arguably simpler unless it's also validating the existing indentation of the pasted text.
I have not had this work reliably for me - my relatively stock VSCode does not indent the pasted code correctly - but I will freely admit that it could, and that this is a point in favour of good tooling.
> And actually, who even is relying on "autoformatters that run on save"? I want the code to look right as I'm writing it, not after. The tools you describe are, to me, about maintaining project standards when multiple people are involved, but fundamentally each person is still making the code look locally, personally right before saving (or committing, since these things are also often done with pre-commit hooks). I can't imagine just typing out whatever slop is syntactically correct and waiting to save the file to fix it. Not when I have a proper text editor that facilitates typing it out the way I want it, taking advantage of awareness of the language syntax.
Most people who write code in these languages rely on them! Format-on-save is one of the first things one sets up in an ecosystem with high-quality formatters. You can write code that is sloppily formatted but conveys your intent, then save and have it auto-format. It completely reformats formatting as a concern. As they say in Go land: "Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite."
> Languages do not and cannot format code. Text editors (including the ones built into IDEs) do. If I type a } and the text changes position, it's not the programming language that did this.
These languages ship with first-class robust and performant formatters that encode the language's preferred style; much effort has gone into developing these formatters [0]. For all intents and purposes, they are part of the language, and users of these languages will be expected to use them.
> And this is also not better in braced languages. Just as I can input a } on a new line in Vim in a braced language and have it dedent, if I want to write more code in Python that's outside the block, I just press the backspace key and it removes an entire level of indentation. And then I start typing that code, and I don't have to input a newline because I'm already on the line where I want the code to be, because I'm not expected to have a } on a separate line from everything else.
I just don't think about it. I write my code in whatever way is easiest to type - including letting the editor auto-insert closing braces - and then hit save to format.
In general, you are freed from formatting as a matter of concern. It's just not something you have to think about, and that's liberating in its own way; it makes bashing some code out, or pasting some code in, trivial.
> Most people who write code in these languages rely on them!
I find that a little hard to believe. There is a universe of programmers out there who are basically invisible to you.
> I just don't think about it. I write my code in whatever way is easiest to type - including letting the editor auto-insert closing braces - and then hit save to format.
Don't you want to see neatly formatted code while you're writing it?
For Go, they have a statistic from a few years back that suggests about 98% of a cross section of real-world Go projects are formatted according to gofmt. (https://jmoiron.net/blog/fmty-dmpty) I can believe Rustfmt and other tools not having quite the same reach, but I would guess that the proportion is still pretty high.
These tools are very standard and very widely used.
> Don't you want to see neatly formatted code while you're writing it?
Every time I pause, I press ctrl-S or an equivalent. So I really am seeing neatly formatted code while I'm writing it. I would guess that 90% of the time, if my code is syntactically valid, it's also neatly formatted. And even if it's not valid code, it's probably very close to being neatly formatted.
Yes, optimize for the thing you do once in a great while over having to read/type redundant braces constantly. Wouldn’t want to have to pay attention and use the tab key! ;-)
I've been certain that copy & pasting code is simply wrong for a long time, but if the ease of doing this is your yardstick for language design quality, then you are simply right.
Back when most of my code was in C or C++ (or Java), I was told all the time, sure you can omit these braces for a single-statement block, but you shouldn't, you'll regret it later. You can leave all the code unindented or irregularly indented, it won't matter to the compiler, but you'll appreciate lining it up in the long run. And all that advice was correct; I was better off in the long run, and I saw others come to regret it all the time. But then, over time, I started to wonder why I had to scan past all these diagonal lines of close braces as I read the code. And I cursed that these languages made it too difficult to pull out the inner parts into separate functions, disentangle setup and teardown from the main loop etc. But I also cursed that after putting in the effort (even if was just "using a proper text editor") to make things line up beautifully and in agreement with the logical structure, I still had to take up vertical space with these redundant markers of the logical structure.
Python was my first language using significant whitespace, and it was a breath of fresh air. That was a bit over 20 years ago, I think. I've learned several other programming languages since then, but I never "looked back" in any meaningful way.