[bjourne]

Indeed that is a problem when you are copy-pasting huge blocks of code. In deeply nested code it can be difficult to determine whether the nesting should be say 28 or 32 spaces. In practice, most people shy away from writing such code because to many levels of nesting is hard to follow. People also prefer to write atomic 5-15 line functions in which keeping track of the nesting levels is trivial.

Many C# and Java-heads complain that Python lacks support for auto-completion. Which is true, the language makes it so you can't have as sophisticated auto-completion as is available for the aforementioned languages in Visual Studio and Eclipse. But it's not so bad because Python developers are trained to prefer shorter names instead of OverlyLongJavaNames such as "getattrs" instead of "GetAllAttributes".

Btw have you noticed that on this site, the only thing that indicates how the comment threads are structured is how the individual comments are indented?

[Aloisius]

Many C# and Java-heads complain that Python lacks support for auto-completion. Which is true

Isn't that an IDE issue and not a language issue? I have no problem with the auto-completion in ipython for instance, though even ipython notebook is only useful for writing simple amounts of code. PyDev though works well too for larger projects albeit a bit sluggishly.

[bjourne]

No, Pythons dynamicness means it is in general impossible to find all available completions:

    m = type('', (), {})()
    setattr(m, 'foo', 123)
    m.f<tab>

Without actually running the code (which is unsafe), no editor could at that point figure out what the completion should be.

[dded]

If you're an Emacs user, have you tried Esc-/ (or M-/) for autocompletion? Note that this works in any mode, not just Python mode.