> memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software

That’s on the level of complaining about having to learn music theory to play the piano, or to learn grammar to write a report. Or having to learn the road rules to drive a car on the street.

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carlosjobim an hour ago | parent [-]

Have you ever seen a police report? They are the people who write most reports of any profession, and usually they are full of grammar and spelling mistakes.

But I understand that the majority of hackers here think that spelling mistakes in a report means that somebody is bad at their job as a police officer. And I know that a good portion of hackers here think that a suspect should have all charges dismissed if a police officer has mixed tabs and spaces when typing his final report, or forgot a semicolon. Or used ' where he should have used ".

	▲	skydhash an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Nope. Doing a syntax error in a programming language is the equivalent of filing the wrong form or filing the form incorrectly. Like if the question was “Suspect Height” and you put “green”. Indentation rule are about scoping, You need a delimiter to mark end of a statements, and quoting often have to do with value type and interpolation. They’re not merely visual markers. Messing them up is the equivalent of answering “400 miles” when asked “what’s the color of the sky?”. ADDENDUM: Yep writing code is filing a form. And just like any form, it’s easy to validate basic errors like syntax and type of values. The hard thing is to validate what happens after the form is processed. i.e, the intent of filing that specific form.