

In praise of mandatory indentation for novice programmers - mqt
http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-mandatory-indentation-for.html

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mattmaroon
As a novice programmer, I indent my code rather anally and find it very
helpful. Even with html/css it's a life saver.

That said, the last thing I need is more debugging due to a missed indentation
somewhere. One of the things I've enjoyed most about Ruby (as opposed to PHP,
C++, etc.) is the reduced number of dumb errors like that. There's nothing
worse, in my mind, than searching for a bug to find it was a missing semi-
colon or some other such triviality, because it feels like time totally
wasted.

A logical bug is at least something I learn from. It shows me the error in my
original thinking, which means I won't make the mistake again. Its
challenging, enlightening and, on some level even fun.

The only lesson I'll get from digging through code to find a bug caused by an
improper character, though, is that I should have chosen a better language.

~~~
edw519
"The only lesson I'll get from digging through code to find a bug caused by an
improper character, though, is that I should have chosen a better language."

That may be the only lesson, but there's also a nice (but hard earned) little
byproduct: you REALLY get to know your code. I want the details of my system
to be stored in my brain's firmware much like Woz did when he designed the
Apple II. Hopefully, the dividends will come later when I'm tweaking it again.

~~~
mattmaroon
That may be true, but I'd prefer the option to dig through my code if/when I
want to. I'm never in favor of enforcing things on people that they could opt
to do themselves because you think it's good for them and they lack
discipline.

------
brlewis
It looks like the author has little or no acquaintance with Lisp or Scheme in
teaching, based on this post:

<http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/boolean-confusion.html>

