[smt88]

I think this project is incredibly cool and lots of people will use this, but...

> significant indentation and dynamic typing

are absolutely the worst parts of Python. I can understand dynamic typing for scripting purposes, no real qualms there, but significant whitespace is on its face absolutely insane (significant characters that are literally invisible).

[dontlaugh]

I have the opposite opinion, having written Python for many years. Dynamic typing is almost never better or necessary, but significant whitespace makes for excellent syntax with no downsides.

[ab5tract]

Significant whitespace is a divisive enough choice that a non-zero percentage of programmers won't even consider the language unless forced to do so by economic circumstances.

It might not be a highly visible downside, but it's there nonetheless. It's better to be honest about that than pretend there is no cultural tradeoff that comes with making such a (IMO) terrible design decision in a language.

There are plenty of people that feel the same way about sigils (like `$foo` in Perl) and semi-colons. I've never understood it -- and likely never will, at this point -- but I don't pretend that there isn't a real demographic effect that these choices bring with them.

[const_cast]

> but significant whitespace makes for excellent syntax with no downsides.

Biggest downside: copying and pasting code breaks in a lot of apps.

Jira, Teams, and probably some others, eat whitespace for breakfast. So if a coworker gives me a code snippet they have to manually edit it (often not even possible) OR I have to, or it won't even run. And since the whitespace is significant, it can't be auto formatted.

Whereas with C# you can copy the most fucked up snippet, put it in your editor and boom - auto-formatted and compiles.

[pansa2]

There’s at least one downside: only having lambda expressions instead of full anonymous functions.

Python’s grammar works great for expressions-inside-statements (and expressions-inside-expressions), but it can’t do statements-inside-expressions. Every attempt to support the latter turns out really ugly, at least in corner cases.

[sinisterMage]

Yep, W++ lambdas are statement-level on purpose My high school teacher once told me lambdas are “university-level,” so I made them the default function syntax in W++. It’s my way of saying: “nah, these aren’t scary — they belong in scripting too.”

That said, I totally agree that full anonymous functions would be useful (especially for more complex logic). Might explore adding those later, but I love the message the current model sends.

[dontlaugh]

It works just fine for F#, for example. It’s doable, but it’s too late for Python.

[sinisterMage]

Thanks! Totally fair — I know significant indentation and dynamic typing aren’t for everyone.

W++ leans that way just to reduce boilerplate and keep the syntax clean for smaller scripts, but it’s not trying to be the “one true way” to write .NET code. Honestly, it’s all about exploring what a lightweight .NET scripting layer could feel like.

Appreciate you checking it out