[simoncion]

> ...but you need to know it.

Why? Firms that don't use it aren't going to use it, and there are a whole lot of firms out there that don't use it.

Plus: grammars that define scope by indentation level can all fucking die in a fire. I don't have nearly enough digits to count the number of times a customer mis-indented a deeply-nested section of a YAML file and caused absolute (very-difficult-to-diagnose) havoc in their environment. [0] IME, Python is not any better than YAML in this regard.

[0] Yes, I'm aware that there is a whitespace-insensitive syntax for YAML. However, it's not the default, and you can't use every YAML construction in it, so it is -IME- rarely used.

[taylodl]

I never said every firm has to use Python, I said every developer needs to know Python basics. I'm old enough to remember a time when every developer needed to know Pascal, even though very few firms actually used it. It was simply a universally known language to assess one's skills. So it is today with Python.

WRT your rant against Python's used of indentation, most people I know aren't a fan, but editors take care of it and it's rarely an issue. It's not a problem for a whiteboard exercise.

[simoncion]

> It was simply a universally known language to assess one's skills. So it is today with Python.

I've had... several... interviews over the years. Zero of them used Python. Might be that you're just in a corner of the industry that loves Python for some reason.

> ...most people I know aren't a fan, but editors take care of it...

I've had editors totally screw up indentation of copied and pasted Python code many, many times. Editors might get it right much of the time, but they absolutely do not (and provably cannot) get it right all of the time. On top of that, visually finding whitespace errors is far, far harder than visually finding enclosing-scope-signifier errors.

> ... and it's rarely an issue.

All sorts of things are rarely an issue until they're an issue. And then when they're an issue, they're often a big fucking deal. [0]

Don't you agree that we (as an industry) should be working to reduce the number of footguns in the world?

[0] Ferinstance, if everyone used an editor that treated YAML as a tree of nodes and used a strict schema [1] to control what nodes you could add where, then that customer havoc I mentioned wouldn't have happened. But, when Corporate Security only gives you SSH access to the restricted-access system that you're currently repairing, running such a tool is simply out of the question. So, one uses a text editor to make one's changes. In situations like this, removing every footgun possible from the work area is very, very important.

[1] Schemas? For YAML? I wish. I really, really do.

[taylodl]

> Don't you agree that we (as an industry) should be working to reduce the number of footguns in the world?

Sure. The problem is everybody and his brother have an idea for what that looks like. There's no universally agreed-upon consensus of what a footgun actually is, which makes it rather difficult to remove them. I've been creating software for over 40 years now and the only constant truism I've discovered in that time is people will find reasons to bitch about something. Some people hate braces. Some people hate wordiness. Some people hate parenthetical statements. Some people hate math and "mathy-looking" languages. It goes on and on. And that's just syntax! We can go down several rabbit holes WRT how to handle errors.

Meanwhile, according to the latest TIOBE index, Python is the #1 language, followed by C++ and then C.

As I keep saying, you don't have to like Python, you don't have to use it, but you should be able to whiteboard it. And whiteboards don't give two fucks about whitespace.

[simoncion]

> Sure.

Cool. I'm glad you agree. Given that we're talking about a particular entirely-avoidable footgun, there's nothing more to be said.

> TIOBE

Oh boy, there are assloads of very valid critcism of TIOBE's popcon. You should take a look at their methodology some time:

> Since there are many questions about the way the TIOBE index is assembled, a special page is devoted to its definition. Basically the calculation comes down to counting hits for the search query +"<language> programming"

See [0] for more embarrassing details.

> And whiteboards don't give two fucks about whitespace.

Given that you're late-career, you may be unaware that very many interviews are done remotely these days. So, no, whiteboards absolutely do give many fucks about whitespace these days.

[0] <https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_defin...>