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Post #3914 · source on Telegram
A Syntactically Significant Rejection
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user Patrick Loeber (@python_engineer). The tweet is a short, two-line dialogue that plays on programming language syntax. The first line is, 'He: You are the ';' to my code.' This is a romantic compliment among programmers who use languages like C++, Java, or JavaScript, where the semicolon is a mandatory statement terminator, implying 'you complete me.' The second line is the punchline, 'She: I code in Python.' In Python, semicolons are optional and rarely used, making the statement effectively mean 'you are unnecessary.' The humor arises from this clever, geeky rejection based on the syntactical differences between major programming languages
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28Comment deleted
The relationship was never going to compile; he was looking for a strongly-typed commitment, and she was into dynamic, duck-typed flings
Cross-language romance is basically writing C headers for a Python module - one misplaced semicolon and the whole relationship fails to compile
After 20 years of explaining to stakeholders why their 'simple' feature request requires rewriting half the codebase, the most unrealistic part of this exchange is a developer actually understanding what makes them incompatible before committing to the relationship
The real tragedy here isn't the rejected pickup line - it's that he clearly didn't check her tech stack before deploying to production. Any senior engineer knows you validate compatibility before committing to a relationship, especially when one party treats whitespace as sacred and the other thinks semicolons are mandatory. This is what happens when you skip the architecture review and go straight to implementation
Try that line on a Pythonista and you'll get PEP 8'd - Black deletes the semicolon, flake8 files E703, and the relationship fails CI
When your Python is so idiomatic, the code handles intros while you debug the existential crisis
Cross-language romance: he offers semicolons; she runs Black - his affection gets removed as an unnecessary delimiter
Better to break with her Comment deleted
or in Swift Comment deleted
swift supports semicolons tho Comment deleted
does not need them tho Comment deleted
yes but it doesnt freak out like python Comment deleted
python just ignores semicolons at the end of lines tho Comment deleted
Burn Comment deleted
i hate twitter so much it's unreal Comment deleted
u on mastodon? Comment deleted
He: Me to. Comment deleted
You are right. Actually his username is python_engineer. So the story is he try to insult her and she thought he doesn’t know she code in python or try to flirt her. Comment deleted
He:I code in COBOL Comment deleted
Brainfsck! https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/cmuc4r/i_wrote_a_brainfuck_interpreter_in_a_single_line/ Comment deleted
print("hello"); Comment deleted
its valid Comment deleted
but useless (as python is) Comment deleted
python isn't useless as a scripting language Comment deleted
but yes, the semicolon is useless in python Comment deleted
unless you want to make shitty one-liner (good one-liners dont use them) Comment deleted
tcc -run now you can use C in scripts Comment deleted
how about no? writing in C takes much more time than writing the equivalent code in python - so it's perfect for glueing other programs together (as I have done in my automated video rendering script) Comment deleted