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I really like the indentation-based syntax of Python; it makes code much more terse.
Is there a reason why Julia was not chosen to be indentation-based as well?
Please note that my intention is solely to learn about the motives that Julia developers had behind this decision; whether we agree or not with those motives is another discussion. I do not intend to start a never-ending discussion.
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In Julia, the function starts with the function keyword and ends with the end. Note: Indentation is a must in Julia. As you can see in the above code in line number 2 and 3. Please note that there are not any fixed number of indentation spaces, but generally, four spaces are preferred.
Julia is a compiled language, which means programs can be directly executed on a computer processor, whereas Python is an interpreted language. It has math-friendly syntax. Unlike Python, Julia features math-friendly syntax as it was designed with the scientific community in mind using R, Matlab, Octave, and so on.
Julia is a general-purpose coding language, and if you're familiar with Python, you will notice that the syntax in Julia looks remarkably similar to Python. All three languages are also open-source languages, which mean they are free to use and distribute, even for commercial purposes.
Many things in Julia are space-sensitive.
See this post on julia-users: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/julia-users/lOmwPvOKc-o/discussion
From Stefan Karpinski
It's a matter of taste – and the fact that we wanted Julia to feel familiar in particular to Matlab users (and to a lesser extent Ruby users). I personally don't like significant indentation. It gets really awkward and fiddly when you're trying to cut and paste into a terminal or into an editor. I've seen a significant number of live Python demos flounder as the presenter struggled with indentation issues. It feels to me like Python programs trail off into space with never-ending scopes. Jeff and Viral both happen to feel similarly, so Julia ended up looking more like Matlab than like Python.
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