4 ms·

This is such a non-issue. Really. The parent posted the reasoning behind the decision, that reasoning is sound. Your disagreement is purely aesthetic, there'

This is such a non-issue. Really. The parent posted the reasoning behind the decision, that reasoning is sound. Your disagreement is purely aesthetic, there's simply no practical reason why the current way is wrong. Please just accept that this is how it is, and stop complaining about it. Please?

philh 18y ago
Python is intended to be aesthetically pleasing in some sense, so I don't think aesthetic objections to some of its features are unwarranted.
- calambrac 18y ago
  This isn't one of the 'some'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed
  - scott_s 18y ago
    I don't think this is bike-shedding. That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues. In this case, their objection is that it violates their intuition, but the placement of join is a natural result of how Python's types are defined. Defining join on all sequences would have real (annoying) implications.
    - calambrac 18y ago
      That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues. How does that not fit this situation? Because there's actually a good technical reason to do it the way it's currently done? Wouldn't that imply that there should be even less discussion of it?
      - scott_s 18y ago
        No, because the discussion should be explaining that good technical reason. Which is what happened. Bike-shedding is when the arguments have relatively the same merit, and the choice makes little difference in the end. I don't think either applies. An example of bike-shedding in this context would be renaming join to fuse.
        calambrac 18y ago
        Bike-shedding is when someone feels the need to interject their opinion simply because the topic is something they feel they understand, regardless of whether that interjection actually contributes anything. Bitching that '\n'.join(alist) should be alist.join('\n') is a favorite pastime of people who want to demonstrate that they've heard of OO programming. It's a perfect example of bike-shedding.
        scott_s 18y ago
        When I use the term, I assume both sides have marginal arguments - so the resulting discussion is a waste of time. I use it this way to remind a group that we're not discussing something important. But if one of the sides has merit, than it's important for the other side to understand that.
        calambrac 18y ago
        You can't just make up your own definition of a well-known term and then call people wrong when they use it correctly: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/u...
        scott_s 18y ago
        I think my interpretation is the more common one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding All of these definitions require the issue to be of marginal benefit to the overall problem. The observation that people feel the need to contribute their opinion on matters they feel they know about is why bikeshedding happens, but it's not bikeshedding itself.
nostrademons 18y ago
That was my point when I started the thread. The Python decision is objectively justified for technical reasons. Yet a large number of people viscerally feel it's wrong. I blame human irrationality - but then, programming languages are meant for humans, so shouldn't they accommodate our irrationality? Otherwise, you get something like Haskell. ;-) BTW, there are other cases where Python has gone the other way. Multiline lambdas, for instance. The case against multiline lambdas is essentially that they look ugly - they let you embed an indentation-sensitive block in what might be a parenthesized expression, which means you need some dangling delimiters. But they're certainly useful, as Scheme/Lisp/Ocaml/etc. have shown. It's similar to the compare-constants-from-the-left idiom in languages where assignment is a valid expression (notably C). If you always write "if (NULL == foo)" instead of "if (foo == NULL)", you eliminate a whole class of bugs. But I've seen very few programmers do this, because it "feels" wrong to a lot of people.
- calambrac 18y ago
  I completely agreed with your original point. The fact that we went from your comment to people actually bitching about join made me really sad. I shouldn't have said that the join argument was "purely aesthetic", I should have said that it was "purely aesthetic and trivial", because you're right, aesthetics are important, and (imo) are reason enough to disallow multiline lambdas. How do you cross the line from trivial to not? I don't know exactly, but I do know that swapping the position of the involved nouns and taking up the same number of characters for a good technical reason doesn't.
- lacker 18y ago
  "if (NULL == foo)" and "'\n'.join(lines)" both feel wrong because you are putting the most complicated object last. The most complicated thing should go first so you can sooner figure out what the heck this line of code is talking about. I would support making the C compiler just disallow "if (x = y)".
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    OTOH, in languages that support first-class functions, it's pretty common to put the functional argument last because then it can wrap to another line without leaving dangling parameters: $.each(my_array, function(val) { // Do something // Do something else }); That's putting the most complicated object last, and feels much more natural than: $.each(function(val) { // Do something // Do something else }, my_array); I suspect it's more that English has trained us to read "noun verb object" sentences. In an if statement, `foo` feels like the subject, and then "== NULL" is the predicate. In an array map, the array is the subject, and the function is the predicate. In the Python join example, the array feels like the subject, "join" is the verb, and "," is the object, which is what makes it seem so awkward. Ruby's array.sum feels more natural because the array is the subject and sum is an intransitive verb.

philh 18y ago

Python is intended to be aesthetically pleasing in some sense, so I don't think aesthetic objections to some of its features are unwarranted.

calambrac 18y ago
This isn't one of the 'some'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed
- scott_s 18y ago
  I don't think this is bike-shedding. That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues. In this case, their objection is that it violates their intuition, but the placement of join is a natural result of how Python's types are defined. Defining join on all sequences would have real (annoying) implications.
  - calambrac 18y ago
    That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues. How does that not fit this situation? Because there's actually a good technical reason to do it the way it's currently done? Wouldn't that imply that there should be even less discussion of it?
    - scott_s 18y ago
      No, because the discussion should be explaining that good technical reason. Which is what happened. Bike-shedding is when the arguments have relatively the same merit, and the choice makes little difference in the end. I don't think either applies. An example of bike-shedding in this context would be renaming join to fuse.
      - calambrac 18y ago
        Bike-shedding is when someone feels the need to interject their opinion simply because the topic is something they feel they understand, regardless of whether that interjection actually contributes anything. Bitching that '\n'.join(alist) should be alist.join('\n') is a favorite pastime of people who want to demonstrate that they've heard of OO programming. It's a perfect example of bike-shedding.
        scott_s 18y ago
        When I use the term, I assume both sides have marginal arguments - so the resulting discussion is a waste of time. I use it this way to remind a group that we're not discussing something important. But if one of the sides has merit, than it's important for the other side to understand that.
        calambrac 18y ago
        You can't just make up your own definition of a well-known term and then call people wrong when they use it correctly: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/u...
        scott_s 18y ago
        I think my interpretation is the more common one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding All of these definitions require the issue to be of marginal benefit to the overall problem. The observation that people feel the need to contribute their opinion on matters they feel they know about is why bikeshedding happens, but it's not bikeshedding itself.

nostrademons 18y ago

That was my point when I started the thread. The Python decision is objectively justified for technical reasons. Yet a large number of people viscerally feel it's wrong. I blame human irrationality - but then, programming languages are meant for humans, so shouldn't they accommodate our irrationality? Otherwise, you get something like Haskell. ;-) BTW, there are other cases where Python has gone the other way. Multiline lambdas, for instance. The case against multiline lambdas is essentially that they look ugly - they let you embed an indentation-sensitive block in what might be a parenthesized expression, which means you need some dangling delimiters. But they're certainly useful, as Scheme/Lisp/Ocaml/etc. have shown. It's similar to the compare-constants-from-the-left idiom in languages where assignment is a valid expression (notably C). If you always write "if (NULL == foo)" instead of "if (foo == NULL)", you eliminate a whole class of bugs. But I've seen very few programmers do this, because it "feels" wrong to a lot of people.

calambrac 18y ago
I completely agreed with your original point. The fact that we went from your comment to people actually bitching about join made me really sad. I shouldn't have said that the join argument was "purely aesthetic", I should have said that it was "purely aesthetic and trivial", because you're right, aesthetics are important, and (imo) are reason enough to disallow multiline lambdas. How do you cross the line from trivial to not? I don't know exactly, but I do know that swapping the position of the involved nouns and taking up the same number of characters for a good technical reason doesn't.
lacker 18y ago
"if (NULL == foo)" and "'\n'.join(lines)" both feel wrong because you are putting the most complicated object last. The most complicated thing should go first so you can sooner figure out what the heck this line of code is talking about. I would support making the C compiler just disallow "if (x = y)".
- nostrademons 18y ago
  OTOH, in languages that support first-class functions, it's pretty common to put the functional argument last because then it can wrap to another line without leaving dangling parameters: $.each(my_array, function(val) { // Do something // Do something else }); That's putting the most complicated object last, and feels much more natural than: $.each(function(val) { // Do something // Do something else }, my_array); I suspect it's more that English has trained us to read "noun verb object" sentences. In an if statement, `foo` feels like the subject, and then "== NULL" is the predicate. In an array map, the array is the subject, and the function is the predicate. In the Python join example, the array feels like the subject, "join" is the verb, and "," is the object, which is what makes it seem so awkward. Ruby's array.sum feels more natural because the array is the subject and sum is an intransitive verb.