S
Scott David Daniels
Sunnan said:
Python is for terse, pithy prose; Python is not for poetry.
--Scott David Daniels
(e-mail address removed)
Python is for terse, pithy prose; Python is not for poetry.
--Scott David Daniels
(e-mail address removed)
R
Ron_Adam
And how that becomes really clear when you want to modify a large
program that uses GOTOs librally.
Ron
D
Donn Cave
Quoth Scott David Daniels <[email protected]>:
| Sunnan wrote:
| > ...Because what is "boring"? The opposite of dense, tense, intense. Utterly
| > predictable; it's like the combination of all my prejudices. Even before
| > I knew, I thought "Bet Python separates statements from expressions".
|
| Python is for terse, pithy prose; Python is not for poetry.
That's an odd thing to say. Poetry is verbose, florid?
Python is Dutch.
Donn
| Sunnan wrote:
| > ...Because what is "boring"? The opposite of dense, tense, intense. Utterly
| > predictable; it's like the combination of all my prejudices. Even before
| > I knew, I thought "Bet Python separates statements from expressions".
|
| Python is for terse, pithy prose; Python is not for poetry.
That's an odd thing to say. Poetry is verbose, florid?
Python is Dutch.
Donn
A
Aahz
Note very, VERY, *VERY* carefully that the quote says nothing about
"boring code". The quote explicitly refers to "reams of trivial code"
as boring -- and that's quite true. Consider this distinction:
if foo == 'red':
print 'foo is red'
elif foo == 'blue':
print 'foo is blue'
versus
print "foo is", foo
I'm sure you can think of many other examples -- real examples -- if you
put your mind to work; Guido's point is about the essential necessity of
refactoring and rewriting code for conciseness and clarity.
--
Aahz ([email protected]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/
"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code --
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death." --GvR
S
Scott David Daniels
Donn said:
No, poetry is to be read slowly and carefully, appreciating the nuance
at every point. You should be able to read "past" python, while poetry
is at least as much about the form of the expression as it is about
what is being expressed.
A
Artie Gold
Ya think? ;-)Torsten said:
--ag
A
alex goldman
Artie said:
Wow, the original is much funnier than the "joke"! (Because it's meant
seriously)
"plus the lambda is slower than the list comprehension" - ROTFL!
S
Sunnan
Scott said:
Right, I agree with these descriptions of python vs "the poetry
languages". I'm not sure whether I'd consider python particularly terse,
though, but I don't know enough about it yet. (I've read a couple of
programs but never started a project of my own in it, mainly because I
love poetry. I can see the appeal of a "prose language", though.)
S
Sunnan
Aahz said:
Thank you for this important clarification.
Is the space added automatically? (Like awk does, if you add a comma.)
Which is a good point to make in almost any language, for code that is
to be maintained.
Sunnan
S
Sunnan
Artie said:
Heh. I was glad that Torsten pointed it out; I didn't get what was funny
about the joke until then.
S
Steve Holden
Scott said:
I though that too, until Michael Spencer sent me the following
executable Python limerick, which I declared the PyCon limerick
competition and read as a part of my closing address:
# Freely re-distributable under Poetic License*
# Voice only the alphanumeric tokens
from itertools import repeat
for feet in [3,3,2,2,3]:
print " ".join("DA-DA-DUM"
for dummy in [None]
for foot in repeat("metric", feet))
*thanks to Peter Hansen
regards
Steve
W
Warren Postma
Donn said:
Ha. I'm vaguely dutch, whatever that means.
I would say if there is a sister word for "Programming" in the english
language, it isn't Poetry and it surely isn't Prose. It's Dialectic.
I appreciate the idea of "Code Poetry", and I find more than a few
coders out there with more than a rudimentary appreciation of Poetry as
well, but I don't like the analogy. No slight to Poetry is intended.
Rather, I intend it as a compliment. Code has an almost entirely
practical purpose, Malbol et al excluded. Poetry, except in cases of
extraordinarily bad poetry, may have little "practical" purpose.
Now dialectic. I like that word. And I think the art of programming is
somewhere in the Late-Medeival period right now. From Merriam Webster,
meanings 1,5,6 seem rather sympathetic to texts used in the creation of
software:
Dialectic
1. LOGIC
5. Any systematic reasoning, exposition, or argument that juxtaposes
opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their
conflict/an intellectual exchange of ideas
6 : the dialectical tension or opposition between two interacting forces
or elements
One way to look at Code is as a textual abstraction of a design. Having
been flattened from brain-space into a two dimension matrix of latin
glyphs, certain semantic/meta-data is typically omitted. Thus a
classical programming problem in many languages: The "Write-only-code"
syndrom. You wrote it, it runs, but you're afraid even to touch it
yourself. Python is stronger than other languages I have used. When I
go back to Python code I've written long enough ago to have forgotten
everything about, I am more able to pick it up and work with it than I
am with other less agile languages. I'm not merely talking about
pedantic details of literal code-readability, I'm talking about the
ability to intuit design from implementation, and the orthogonality of
the design of the system to the to the faculty of human reason. (In not
so many words: Python fits my brain.)
Warren
S
Steve Holden
Scott said:
I though that too, until Michael Spencer sent me the following
executable Python limerick, which I declared the PyCon limerick
competition and read as a part of my closing address:
# Freely re-distributable under Poetic License*
# Voice only the alphanumeric tokens
from itertools import repeat
for feet in [3,3,2,2,3]:
print " ".join("DA-DA-DUM"
for dummy in [None]
for foot in repeat("metric", feet))
*thanks to Peter Hansen
regards
Steve
T
T.D. Lassagne
Please consider joining the International Sarcasm Society. Our motto is
"Like We Need YOUR Support".
S
Sunnan
T.D. Lassagne said:
I *recognize* sarcasm; I just don't think it's very funny. Now parody,
which this turned out to be, I can appreciate.
A
Aahz
[Aahz]
The important word was "honest", not "feeling".
Fair enough.
You're free to continue using 1.5.2. Why don't you? Because you want
shiny new features only available in current releases. To maintain true
"only one way", existing features would need to be removed -- but that
would break backward compatibility. Given the tension of the various
requirements, I think that Python has broken "only one way" as little as
possible, with the full intention of getting closer to its ideal when the
time comes to break backward compatibility.
You just can't have your cake and eat it, too.
--
Aahz ([email protected]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/
"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code --
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death." --GvR
I
Ivan Van Laningham
Hi All--
I wrote my mayalib package under 1.3.0. It still runs perfectly well.
I will only have to rewrite parts of it when the string module goes
away. Everything else works, and will continue to work for the
forseeable future.
That's actually less change than happened with C over the same time
period. But there, the language didn't change, just the environment
around it--includes, libs, where things lived, etc.
Metta,
Ivan
----------------------------------------------
Ivan Van Laningham
God N Locomotive Works
http://www.andi-holmes.com/
http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html
Army Signal Corps: Cu Chi, Class of '70
Author: Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours
I wrote my mayalib package under 1.3.0. It still runs perfectly well.
I will only have to rewrite parts of it when the string module goes
away. Everything else works, and will continue to work for the
forseeable future.
That's actually less change than happened with C over the same time
period. But there, the language didn't change, just the environment
around it--includes, libs, where things lived, etc.
Metta,
Ivan
----------------------------------------------
Ivan Van Laningham
God N Locomotive Works
http://www.andi-holmes.com/
http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html
Army Signal Corps: Cu Chi, Class of '70
Author: Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours
V
Ville Vainio
Sunnan> It's just that I'm having a hard time matching that quote
Sunnan> to what I though python was about. I thought boring code
Sunnan> was considered a virtue in python. ("Explicit is better
Sunnan> than implicit", "sparse is better than dense".)
Boring code is code that numbs your senses with constant flow of
boilerplate crap, memory management and redundant type declarations
and general blah blah that you skip when you are trying to figure out
what a piece of code does. It's a code that you wish you could train a
monkey to write for you while you go for lunch. Think C++ or Java.
Sunnan> to what I though python was about. I thought boring code
Sunnan> was considered a virtue in python. ("Explicit is better
Sunnan> than implicit", "sparse is better than dense".)
Boring code is code that numbs your senses with constant flow of
boilerplate crap, memory management and redundant type declarations
and general blah blah that you skip when you are trying to figure out
what a piece of code does. It's a code that you wish you could train a
monkey to write for you while you go for lunch. Think C++ or Java.
V
Ville Vainio
Sunnan> languages". I'm not sure whether I'd consider python
Sunnan> particularly terse, though, but I don't know enough about
Sunnan> it yet. (I've read a
Read up on list comprehensions and generator expressions. You'll see
the terse side of Python (and genexps look kinda poetic too ;-).
Sunnan> particularly terse, though, but I don't know enough about
Sunnan> it yet. (I've read a
Read up on list comprehensions and generator expressions. You'll see
the terse side of Python (and genexps look kinda poetic too ;-).
S
Sunnan
Ville said:
I am familiar with lc:s/genexps, I usually program in scheme which also
has them (srfi-42).
They're very nice and I use them a lot.