3 ms·
> "there should be one and preferably only one way to do it" In my very humble opinion this idiom is amazing at the start of a language and then it handcuffs i
by baldfat 12y ago
> "there should be one and preferably only one way to do it"
In my very humble opinion this idiom is amazing at the start of a language and then it handcuffs it and that is why we have Python 2 or Python 3 issues.
I use to use Python for statistical work and about 2 years ago I switched to R. R is VERY flexible and seen a huge change over the last 5 or so years. It has changed for me especially in the last 6 months with changes in what libraries I use. Using dplyr and other libraries my code is night and day different. We now have piping with %>% that changes me code completely and makes it MUCH more readable and quick to write code. I don't see anything like this happening quickly in Python.
- kibwen 12y agoWhen you write code that's intended to be maintained for years, a degree of resistance to shifting language idioms should be considered a feature. That's not to say that Python itself is the greatest language for long-term maintainability, but I personally have both years-old Python code and years-old R code, and any thoughts of doing maintenance on the latter fills me with trepidation. But when it comes to short-term, one-off, or unimportant tasks, I agree that an emphasis on flexibility is welcome. There's a reason that TIMTOWTDI works so well for Perl in its original role as a shell scripting language.