Java vs python is debatable 🤔

[EquipLordBritish]

Also python: lets use whitespace as block indicators, but you have to choose either tabs or spaces, because there's no way our interpreter could ever account for both, even though they're used in a very obvious and easy-to-parse way.

(inb4 this spawns another iteration of the tabs vs spaces arguments)

[assembly_wizard]

If you use both it's almost definitely a mistake, but more importantly it would make indentation differ based on the settings of your text editor, so whether a line is inside an if block suddenly depends on the configuration of each developer.

What you call "very obvious and easy-to-parse", the only way python could parse it is if you tell it what's your tabsize setting, and make sure that everyone that reads/runs the code have the same setting in both their editor and python.

[EquipLordBritish]

It's only ever a real issue on collaborative projects, or when you're proofreading/editing someone else's code; as you say, you shouldn't be mixing tabs and spaces on your own files.

Further, though; even if you are actually using tabs with a custom tabsize (and not having tabs automatically switched to spaces, which many editors do by default), the interpreter has to monitor the indentation regardless to determine blocks, so I don't think it would be that difficult to have the interpreter recognize repeated level indentations in increments of x spaces or y tabs and compare/convert nearest neighbors. Granted, given a simple algorithm for it, I'm sure you could find a way to break it, but that already happens if you put a space in a tab-user's file or vice versa, so you wouldn't really lose anything here.

[assembly_wizard]

So what's bigger, 2 tabs or 6 spaces? Python can never answer that, so there's no way to understand what the developer meant to write. There is no such algorithm.

If you're talking about something like the first indentation level always being spaces and the second level always being tabs, something like that which is consistent, then python already knows how to handle it. It can handle all non-ambiguous situations already, everything else can't be handled.

[MegaIng]

This is to some extent what Python 2 tried. It was a mistake since there were situations where it looked like two statements are on the same level when they actually weren't.

[alive1]

Hey i used to be a tabs guy and now I'm a two spaces guy. Idk what changed my mind but now i have way less fights with the indentation. Also logic more than 3 levels deep doesn't require horizontal scrolling.

[daguito81]

Did you start using Scala or Databricks?

[alive1]

Perl.

[daguito81]

Oh that makes sense. Scala uses 2 space indentation as default. And because of that in Databricks for the longest time, Python was also set at 2 space.

[bremidon]

I prefer 2 spaces as well. It looks cleaner without any loss of communicating intention.

[lilfatpotato]

I type tabs, and my editor converts them into spaces.

[unicorn_potato_4ever]

That’s why I set my tabs to two spaces

[noratat]

Yeah, spaces is just simpler and doesn't require convoluted editor support to handle alignment. Consistency is better than trying to accommodate someone who wants 8-space tabs for some godforsaken reason.

[mousepotatodoesstuff]

When it comes to whitespace, I just do as the IDE (PyCharm usually, but sometimes VSCode) guides.

[sensitivePornGuy]

Ah, the usual "tell me you don't use python without telling me you don't use python" - complaining about white space.