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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> It's so much better if it's one-to-one. You can use the same documentation. The same search terms. You don't have to translate back and forth in your head all the time.

Those are things that make it better for the library maintainers, sure, but presenting (and documenting) an API that is idiomatic, both in structure and behavior, for the host language is better for library consumers, as it doesn't force them to context switch between the idioms of the host language and the idioms of the foreign library.

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Agree with having a pythonic API.

There are already examples in the "Hello Qt" which are easily solvable:

  app = QApplication([])
  # should read instead:
  app = QApplication()

where the empty list is the default argument. Also

  app.exec_()
  # should be instead
  app.exec()

as it is also in the C++ API.

These small things make the difference.

exec is a reserved keyword in Python. The _ is there because the code wouldn't "compile" otherwise.

`exec` is a python built-in (in py3, it was a keyword in py2). Variables that would clash names with keywords / built-is are conventionally followed by an _, so `exec_` is expected.

I agree on your first example.

Parent was taking about PEP8, which is purely syntactic. I would argue that has very little to do with structure and behaviour. It's completely superficial.

Well, if code readability is superficial to you, you are probably not the target group of Python I guess. For Python users, readability, however, is very important.

Syntax is an element of structure. But, yes, I was going beyond the upthread comment.

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