Introducing Cobra

[SJS]

begin  quoting Gabriel Sechan as of Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 05:12:32PM -0600:
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> > Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 15:01:21 -0800
> > From: kplug at davidb.org
> > To: kplug-lpsg at kernel-panic.org
> > Subject: Re: Introducing Cobra
> > 
> > On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 04:57:05PM -0600, Gabriel Sechan wrote:
> > 
> >>The problem is that its much easier to get whitespace wrong than it is to
> >>get braces wrong.  For example-  one of my most frequent refactors is
> >>changing the nesting of a chunk of code-  either moving it into a loop,
> >>out of a loop, or into a new function. If you use braces, the code will
> >>work, but may be indented in an ugly matter.  If you do it with
> >>whitespace, it will be broken.
> > 
> > I would instead argue that this particular example is evidence of why
> > indent-based blocking is a good thing, rather than bad.
> > 
> > When I move a block of code in python, it is immediately obvious to me what
> > kind of nesting change is needed.  It is just a few keystrokes to shift the
> > block to the right place.  With braces, it is very easy to have them wrong,
> > but get the indentation right.
> 
> I have never in my life seen the indentation wrong but the braces
> right.

I have.

>         I have seen the reverse, frequently.

Sometimes, this too.

I also *deliberately* muck up the indentation on a regular basis.

> While you can put a brace in the wrong spot as a bug, you can do the
> same with whitespace.  You'll never get that type of error from just
> moving code around.  THis is absolutely a reason why indent based
> blocking is a bad thing.  

I see a lot of "start with four spaces, indent a long way, come back to
three spaces, indent a long way, come back to four spaces"... which is
hard to see.

> Indent based blocking is an attempt at solving a social problem
> (people who don't indent, although I've never actually met one of
> these people)

Heh. I have. I've had the "let's talk about _why_ we indent" with
several junior programmers. 

>               with a technical solution (indentation as semanticly
> meaningful).  That just doesn't work-  you're causing at least as many
> problems as you're stopping (probably far more, because I've never met
> a programmer who didn't indent predictably) and adding in whole new
> classes of bugs.  The correct answer is to educate the people who
> don't indent.

Yup. Because if they're not indenting, they've probably got other
issues that they need to be educated about.

[snip]

-- 
I seem to have seen quite a lot of bad code
Which is probably how I got in this grumpy mode
Stewart Stremler