The elephant in the room – whitespace

OK, OK, we know that Python is whitespace-delimited: tabs matter! However, JavaScript really doesn't care about whitespace in most cases. As we saw before, indentation and whitespace is a matter of style, not syntax.

So here's the thing: when I was first learning Python, the idea of a language that was whitespace-dependent was abhorrent. "How could a language that could break with an improper IDE setting survive?", I thought. My opinions aside, the good news is that indentation in Python is parallel to indentation plus curly braces in JavaScript.

Here's an example:

def hello_world(x):
 if x > 3:
   x += 1
 else:
   x += 2
 return x

function helloWorld(val) {
  if (val > 3) {
    return ++val
  } else {
    return val+2
  }
}

If you notice, our if statement inside our Python function is indented in the same way that this JavaScript example is indented, albeit without the curly braces. So yay...