“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

Python was my first programming language, ~15 years ago. The bracket- and semicolon-free syntax is beautiful and approachable to this day. Python is my go-to for writing data format conversion scripts. I wrote a random sentence generator in Python 10 years ago that gave me and my friends hours of entertainment.

Thanks, Guido, for the good times!

I can never get into Python and end up with as much passion as you. For me, its a very powerful and useful language - no doubt about it.

But the aesthetics of a whitespace language just don't jive with my 30+ years of experience writing code. No matter how many times I try over the past few decades, I just can't get passionate about writing Python code. I know its power, and I totally grok its value to our industry - but for me, Lua is just far more elegant, even if it doesn't ship with all of Pythons' goosebridles. Lua is my go-to scripting language; I only ever use Python if I have to - i.e. its enforced on me by others.

I really do try to get over this personal handicap, often enough, but the moment I have to start thinking about indentation I just lose all the passion and it starts feeling like a drag. What a dilemma, because I know it has been used for many, many great things .. I just wish I could get over my aversion to white-space'ing things all the time. I've tried editor after editor (well, expect the Python-specific things), but it just doesn't click.

Ah well.

The indentation should be almost the same as any other language. Unless you have an aversion to consistent code-style.

Python whitespace was only annoying for me years ago when it still had trouble handling tabs and spaces in the same file, and you would run into literally invisible bugs. I haven't run into that in a long time, though.

It's also basically impossible to cut-and-paste code from a web forum. Was that "else" from the inner or the outer "if"?