The First in an Ongoing List of Programming Languages You Love but I Hate
- Whitespace: Whitespace should not be meaningful. It elevates one of the stupidest arguments in programming (tabs! no spaces! 2! no 4!) to the core of the language. It also is a kind of bad grammar: with meaningful whitespace, it becomes more difficult to understand the intent of the program quickly, as compared to a language with clear block terminators. Look, we killed FORTRAN for a reason, people, and I bet that significant whitespace had a lot to do with it.
- Speed: It is slow, even for a scripting language.
- No difference between declaring and using a variable. It would be nice to be able to let python know I intend to introduce a new variable name and not a typo.
Pythons are mean
- Concurrency is bad. This surprises me, given how important concurrency is to modern programming and how much Python is used in mathematical setting.s
- The difference between the way split and join work. Why the heck is it split(“|”) but “|”.join(blah)?