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> It would be un-Pythonic to write code that a less expert programmer couldn't understand. I assume you have syntactical concerns and syntactical concerns only

> It would be un-Pythonic to write code that a less expert programmer couldn't understand. I assume you have syntactical concerns and syntactical concerns only in mind, as domain knowledge and local style and creative decisions are far more important for maintainability. Even so, I don't believe you. I've seen far too much Python code which uses decorators and generators and list comprehensions to believe that it's un-Pythonic to "write code that a less expert programmer couldn't understand".

dkarl 17y ago
The point is that as a Python programmer, even a casual one, I know what decorators and generators are and can look up how they work. I can pretty confidently expect to figure out what they mean in any case I need to. And yeah, the language has arguably become less Pythonic as it caters to more expert programmers at the expense of less expert ones. From the beginning, there have been people who claimed that primitive, clear, inelegant code is worse than elegant, concise code that depends on extra language features. Usually that claim has been rejected, but as sometimes happens in politics, the people who care enough to influence the process are not always the people for whom the process is supposed to work. I see decorators as something of a Trojan horse through which Python became more of a language for me (a software developer who copes with, and sometimes even likes, C++) and less of a language for my customers (scientists and engineers). Which is tragic because there are plenty of languages for software developers and not enough languages for people who just need something stupidly simple yet powerful enough for all practical purposes. Still, despite the erosion of its simplicity, Python stands out for its philosophy of simplicity and its adherence to it. There remains a gulf between a language that sounded a clarion call for simplicity and has slipped a little from its principles and a language that chose the red pill and dove down the rabbit hole basically for the sheer beautiful hell of it.
- chromatic 17y ago
  > There remains a gulf between a language that sounded a clarion call for simplicity and has slipped a little from its principles and a language that chose the red pill and dove down the rabbit hole basically for the sheer beautiful hell of it. I'm don't understand what the difference between Scheme circa 1975 and R6RS has to do with Python. It's awfully circular to claim that Python is beautifully Pythonic despite that it's become less Pythonic even as it's adhered to its philosophy of simplicity. If anything, I'd think that a language that "reads like pseudocode!" to the uninitiated wouldn't require even casual programmers to look up syntactic elements in the documentation, the way some people talk about Python.

dkarl 17y ago

The point is that as a Python programmer, even a casual one, I know what decorators and generators are and can look up how they work. I can pretty confidently expect to figure out what they mean in any case I need to. And yeah, the language has arguably become less Pythonic as it caters to more expert programmers at the expense of less expert ones. From the beginning, there have been people who claimed that primitive, clear, inelegant code is worse than elegant, concise code that depends on extra language features. Usually that claim has been rejected, but as sometimes happens in politics, the people who care enough to influence the process are not always the people for whom the process is supposed to work. I see decorators as something of a Trojan horse through which Python became more of a language for me (a software developer who copes with, and sometimes even likes, C++) and less of a language for my customers (scientists and engineers). Which is tragic because there are plenty of languages for software developers and not enough languages for people who just need something stupidly simple yet powerful enough for all practical purposes. Still, despite the erosion of its simplicity, Python stands out for its philosophy of simplicity and its adherence to it. There remains a gulf between a language that sounded a clarion call for simplicity and has slipped a little from its principles and a language that chose the red pill and dove down the rabbit hole basically for the sheer beautiful hell of it.

chromatic 17y ago
> There remains a gulf between a language that sounded a clarion call for simplicity and has slipped a little from its principles and a language that chose the red pill and dove down the rabbit hole basically for the sheer beautiful hell of it. I'm don't understand what the difference between Scheme circa 1975 and R6RS has to do with Python. It's awfully circular to claim that Python is beautifully Pythonic despite that it's become less Pythonic even as it's adhered to its philosophy of simplicity. If anything, I'd think that a language that "reads like pseudocode!" to the uninitiated wouldn't require even casual programmers to look up syntactic elements in the documentation, the way some people talk about Python.