this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Growing up with C made me assume semicolons and braces were needed to avoid subtle bugs, but experience with more recent languages showed me that it's possible to reliably parse the same semantic cues that humans use: indentation, parentheses, and other such context. (Perhaps this was less viable when C was invented, due to more constrained hardware.)
I was skeptical at first, but in practice, I have never encountered a bug caused by this approach in Python, Nim, or any other language implementing it consistently, over the course of a decade or two using them. Meanwhile, I have seen more than a few bugs caused by brace and semicolon mistakes.
So nowadays (outside of niche & domain-specific languages) I see braces and semicolons as little more than annoying noise and fuel for religious arguments.
In Java it’s quite difficult to forget semicolon and still have a syntactically correct program.
I think braces are incredibly important. With Python it can be confusing which indentation is correct when copying code between files. Different indentations can easily be still syntactically correct, but the outcome is vastly different. It’s often I have to double and triple check to verify I copied the code with correct indentation.
I vaguely remember facing that issue once or twice in the past, but certainly not often. It was because the pasted code was too long for its starting point to be easily found in my editor, even if I scrolled up a bit.
If this happens to you often, I wonder: perhaps the code you maintain should be broken into smaller functions?
If I was in that situation again, I think I would simply place a bookmark before pasting and then jump back to the bookmark to indent/dedent the pasted block appropriately.
Edit: Come to think of it, I would have to check and correct it regardless of the language and braces, since confusingly indented code is unwelcome in my commits.
Don't you use a formatter that fixes whitespace in sloppy writing?
I've never needed one.