Juan Zanos wrote:

> 
> Trying to argue that longer is somehow inherently better doesn't make any
> sense.  

Same holds for the inverse. But no one has been arguing that longer is 
inherently better.

My point is that zero entropy and  maximal information is a poor goal 
when targeting people, that some amount of redundancy reduces errors and 
improves communication (again, for people).

I do not have any objective way to say what, exactly, that is for a 
programming language.  My own experience from working with indentation 
sensitive languages is that the trade-offs do not always sit well with 
me.   Nor does the verbosity of Java

My experience with Haskell has been much different than my attempts at 
Python.  Maybe it's Haskell's emphasis on mathematical functions, on 
using a format that employs (so it seems) a whole lot of equal signs. 
The use of white space there feels much more natural than it did for me 
with Python.  (I also think Haskell induces different expectations about 
what things should look like. It would probably feel wrong to use do/end 
for something that is essentially mathematics.)

The information provided by significant indentation,  while usable (and 
possibly more efficient for some cases of human parsing), introduces 
restrictions on how it may be used elsewhere, effectively limiting how a 
writer expresses non-syntactical information in a program.

What puts me off so many discussions about code formatting is the idea 
that code is first meant to provide instructions to a machine, and ideas 
for people second.

The "machines first" attitude may be the reason for so much cruft in 
Java.  I'm sure GvR had "people first" in mind when opting for 
significant indentation, but perhaps he viewed writing software as 
primarily an exercise in generating code, less as writing a document for 
other humans that is also machine readable.  That is, the goal was 
highly-readable computer expressions, not machine-readable people 
expressions.


-- 
James Britt

www.jamesbritt.com           - Playing with Better Toys
www.ruby-doc.org             - Ruby Help & Documentation
www.rubystuff.com            - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
www.neurogami.com            - Smart application development