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1) One of pythons design philosophies is "explicit is better than implicit". 2) This is not a hurdle to hello world. print("Hello World") is a complete

1) One of pythons design philosophies is "explicit is better than implicit". 2) This is not a hurdle to hello world. print("Hello World") is a complete program that does exactly what you want. Needing to wrap it in a function would be an additional hurdle. For complex programs; that is a hurdle well worth jumping. But for simple scripts (python is a scripting language), or teaching purposes, it is not always needed.

kzrdude 6y ago
Ad 1, the current idiom uses dunder name, which is implicitly defined and looks special. Making main special would be about the same level of a solution, yet more conventional
- hansvm 6y ago
  There's always `__main__.py` if you want something special.
- toyg 6y ago
  Dunder methods don’t “look” special, they are. Marking them as such has side-effects, and as soon as you see a dunder, you know you’re going “lower”. If “main” has to be a special function, it must keep the dunder.
jimbob45 6y ago
I understand that what you have is a complete program but every new Pythonist is going to next read the documentation that says, “Having a main method is a really good idea” and go try to implement one. Sure, in 1% of cases, you’ll need the granular control over how main is called but since when do languages cater to the 1%?
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  Can't you just put code in `def main` and then have `main()` at the top-level if you don't need to worry about imports? It seems like you can probably get pretty far as a beginner before you need to worry about being able to both import and run the same file.