My Reason to hate Python might be GONE!

Let me show you some code.

#!/usr/bin/env python

mylist = [0,1,2,3]

for n in mylist:
 for  m in mylist:
  print m,n
    print m,n
 print n

Looks pretty normal, right? Just a loop, right? Just a loop within a loop.

Yes it is, but if you look closer, you'll notice two spaces in front of the second print statement.

This is exactly what happened to me the first time I tried Python, about 15 years ago. It was code that showed open machines in ENAD 302, and I ran it on an NT machine I had installed ActiveState Python on. I no longer have that job, thus no longer have that machine and that version of Python. I no longer can find the code, and the computer lab in ENAD 302 is gone.

As is ENAD.

All I have is the memory of having pages of error reports that didn't tell me that the problem was that, halfway into a 200-or-so line Python program. This has lead me to set expandtab or the equivalent for every editor I've used since. Burn me once, shame on you, but burn me twice...

I admit that disliked Python before that, but then it was more "Perl does this already, so why do I have to learn how to do the exact same thing in another dynamic language? What do I gain?" rather than "This language takes as a core feature a means to create undetectable errors."

But no. My hatred of Python stopped coming from a logical place. "Creates undetectable errors" is a logical argument, one that is no longer true, but I got taken to a place of negative emotion, like someone who was bitten by a dog as a child and now is overcome with fear or hate when one comes up now.

(I tried it a few times since, and each time, my experience said "this is an objectively stupid way of doing things", until I bumped into things like Sikuli or my FitBit code where there was either no other way or this was the easiest way to get to "working".)

Then I find someone online who says "tabs are better than spaces". For outputting formatted text, I do agree, but in code, that leads to invisible bugs. So, when someone is wrong online, you correct them.

But then, I wrote the above code, expecting the same errors and received none.

(In this process, I learned some interesting things about Sublime Text, like the way you can set color_scheme and draw_white_space and translate_tabs_to_spaces at a language-specific level, which I did to allow me to see the white space when writing the above code. Sublime Text is neat.)

I've been saying this for a while, but I think this is the last thing I needed to find out before I lived it: the Python that's here today is not the Python that bit me 15 years ago, and I should get over my hangups and "pet the dog".