3 ms·

I'm all for syntactic sugar, but my experience with teaching programming is that Python is easy to pick up because of the lack of weird operators. Decorators ar

I'm all for syntactic sugar, but my experience with teaching programming is that Python is easy to pick up because of the lack of weird operators. Decorators are an obvious example where many struggle; and this looks like another. It will take someone cleverer than me to come up with an alternative solutions; I suspect they chose "$" because it isn't an operator in Python and you have to do a lot of partial application, so the logic was probably "short is better". But having something more intuitive would be great (more pythonic?).

dkersten 10y ago
Python has lots of weird operators. List/dict comprehension, list slicing, * and in arguments. Comma for tuples (which make sense to me, but add a lot of magic, especially since, in my experience, beginners often assume that the parentheses are what make tuples). There's many more examples, but those are the ones that immediately spring to mind. Reading actual production Python code is not any easier than many other languages and certainly far from "executable pseudocode"
- guitarbill 10y ago
  That's fair - * args and * * kwargs does feel like a hack, although denoting "zero or more" as * has a bit of tradition. I'd have to disagree with list/dict comprehension, pretty natural considering e.g Javascript/JSON also use [] / {} for each, respectively (Obviously completely subjective). I also get that there's only so many symbols to pick from. Would have been cool if it was *, which is already used for arguments. I think my larger point is that even the small decisions when making a language matter. There isn't really right/wrong or better/worse, but IMO Python operators feel more cohesive/uniform than Ruby or Perl. Also, describing how operator usage feels is hard. Edit: Asterisks causing italics.

3 ms·

I'm all for syntactic sugar, but my experience with teaching programming is that Python is easy to pick up because of the lack of weird operators. Decorators ar

by guitarbill 10y ago

dkersten 10y ago
Python has lots of weird operators. List/dict comprehension, list slicing, * and in arguments. Comma for tuples (which make sense to me, but add a lot of magic, especially since, in my experience, beginners often assume that the parentheses are what make tuples). There's many more examples, but those are the ones that immediately spring to mind. Reading actual production Python code is not any easier than many other languages and certainly far from "executable pseudocode"
- guitarbill 10y ago
  That's fair - * args and * * kwargs does feel like a hack, although denoting "zero or more" as * has a bit of tradition. I'd have to disagree with list/dict comprehension, pretty natural considering e.g Javascript/JSON also use [] / {} for each, respectively (Obviously completely subjective). I also get that there's only so many symbols to pick from. Would have been cool if it was *, which is already used for arguments. I think my larger point is that even the small decisions when making a language matter. There isn't really right/wrong or better/worse, but IMO Python operators feel more cohesive/uniform than Ruby or Perl. Also, describing how operator usage feels is hard. Edit: Asterisks causing italics.