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But we're not talking about the language per se; we're talking about the library and application developers and the influence that the notion of "Pythonic" has
by empthought 9y ago
But we're not talking about the language per se; we're talking about the library and application developers and the influence that the notion of "Pythonic" has on them.
Imagine there wasn't such a unifying straw man concept or platonic ideal of being good Python. Would there still be single NumPy and SciPy implementations? Or would the work be scattered across smaller, less well-resourced efforts whose contributors disagreed on ultimately trivial things like whether the API makes use of higher-order functions, metaprogramming, or having many ways to do something?
- brudgers 9y agoThere's no Pythonic analog in JavaScript and there are still many useful libraries and applications. There's the entirely orthogonal MINSWAN in Ruby and yet there's Rails. On the numeric side, there's Boost in Cpp and BLAS in Fortran. And NumPy is useful because of the development using C where Pythonic is irrelevant.
- empthought 9y ago> There's no Pythonic analog in JavaScript and there are still many useful libraries and applications. Yes, that's exactly my point, there are many of them, none of which really have the same sort of universal buy-in, because people are constantly disagreeing about .forEach vs. for loops, or promises vs. callbacks, or whatever. Boost has very strict guidelines about its approach to design and implementation[1] -- it even quotes the Zen of Python. I didn't say that the concept of "Pythonic" is necessary to implement high-performing and widely-used libraries. I am merely contradicting your unsubstantiated assertion that the concept is harmful. [1]: http://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html http://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html