4 ms·

> Decorators are just syntactic sugar. Are you arguing against syntactic sugar and perhaps for a slimmer "purer" syntax? If so, I think that's a valid point (th

> Decorators are just syntactic sugar. Are you arguing against syntactic sugar and perhaps for a slimmer "purer" syntax? If so, I think that's a valid point (though I happen to disagree in this case). I am in favour of semantic sugar, I just don't think it should be part of the language. Languages should be small, and have features that enable syntactic sugar to be written in the language. These features might include macros (like in Lisp, or at a pinch C) or overloaded operators (as in C++ or Python). Regarding decorators, I don't see that they bring much value. The decorator syntax is no shorter than doing it without decorators, so if you remove the decorator syntax you're making Python a smaller language which makes it easier to learn and understand.

wisty 16y ago
Macros (and their more hygienic cousins) are not always a good idea. They make it very hard to understand what the rest of the program does, unless you can grep the whole thing. Lispers will violently disagree with me here. Regarding decorators, no they don't seem to be that useful. They do bloat the documentation, if not the language; and you don't ever really need them.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  > Macros (and their more hygienic cousins) are not always a good idea. They make it very hard to understand what the rest of the program does, unless you can grep the whole thing. So does object-oriented programming, more often than not. I'm not sure that's a sufficient argument, especially if there's no other way to do static metaprogramming in a language.
- baddox 16y ago
  Though decorators functional identically do just passing a function to another function which returns a function, the decorator syntax is uniquely useful. For framework like Django, it lets you "tag" a function with a single line at the top. I think this greatly enhances readability over the alternative.

wisty 16y ago

Macros (and their more hygienic cousins) are not always a good idea. They make it very hard to understand what the rest of the program does, unless you can grep the whole thing. Lispers will violently disagree with me here. Regarding decorators, no they don't seem to be that useful. They do bloat the documentation, if not the language; and you don't ever really need them.

silentbicycle 16y ago
> Macros (and their more hygienic cousins) are not always a good idea. They make it very hard to understand what the rest of the program does, unless you can grep the whole thing. So does object-oriented programming, more often than not. I'm not sure that's a sufficient argument, especially if there's no other way to do static metaprogramming in a language.
baddox 16y ago
Though decorators functional identically do just passing a function to another function which returns a function, the decorator syntax is uniquely useful. For framework like Django, it lets you "tag" a function with a single line at the top. I think this greatly enhances readability over the alternative.