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My personal theory of "why python" is that it broke with the unixism of recycling syntactical conventions. While the conventions were useful, the line-noise asp
by _jal 7y ago
My personal theory of "why python" is that it broke with the unixism of recycling syntactical conventions. While the conventions were useful, the line-noise aspects that were perpetuated turned a lot of people off as unnecessary obfuscation. Python was more than a clean break from that, it was pushing towards actually trying to enforce a certain amount of readability.
I default to python for scripting at work because it is popular - we are more likely to find folks who have at least seen it before. Most of my throwaway and experimental code is Perl5, just out of long habit.
- rectangletangle 7y agoThe clean minimal syntax has always been my favorite part of Python. I'm really really glad that Python 3 didn't go the way of Perl 6, It was very close there for a while. Also the ellipsis literal `...`, never need to use `pass`.
- m463 7y agoI think you're right. It "downgraded" regular expressions, which are entrenched as first-order citizens in most of unix, and made you use function calls instead. Although it would seem to make regular expressions clumsier to use, it made it easier to encode and decode them. One of the most frustrating and painful things is trying to figure out if something in a regular expression is a literal character, a matching character or an escape character, and it can be deeper, such as a variable or other syntax character from the enclosing language. This kind of stuff trips up beginners and seasoned folks alike. Python did the same thing with path manipulation, which suffered from the same sorts of problems.