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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things that gets me about Python.

It makes this big noise about being a super-friendly form of executable pseudocode, but then you open any code example and the first thing you see is two asterisks and the mysterious word "kwargs" (a Swedish dessert perhaps?).

I wouldn't mind except for all the haughty pretense about Python being a language that doesn't do this sort of thing. Dear Python, get a grip, you're just another ASCII-abusing interpreted monstrosity like Perl, you just decided to make programmer life suck with whitespace instead.

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Key word arguments. And I would consider the pythonic approach to be more pragmatic than anything. The language isn't haughty, it just does what it's told. That being said, you've provided a perfect example of what haughty looks like.

In the parent’s defense, people write a lot more cryptic Python than they do other languages. There are no metaclasses in Go nor abused operator overloads or half-baked DSLs. People don’t use dictionaries as structs to hang off whatever they like.

It’s kind of a penny wise and pound foolish approach. Arguably it’s not python’s fault, but that’s a poor consolation for folks who have to deal with these messes.

Is that really true? Sure you can write cryptic code using operator overloads, but the convention is to only use them in cases where they improve readability. For example numpy code would be a lot less maintainable without operator overloading IMHO.

I haven't written numerical code in Go but I am skeptical it will be as maintainable without operators. The lack of a particular feature does not in itself make code more maintainable.

I can't speak to metaclasses, since I have never had to maintain code using them. In my experience they are pretty rare.

It's been true in my experience. Operator overloads are marginally beneficial and for some reason they're prone to be abused. Put differently, `Add(x, y)` isn't any less maintainable than `x + y`, but the former is pretty much never abused, while the latter is a popular abuse target.

I've been writing Python and Go extensively for the last 10 and 5 years respectively. I really recommend giving Go a shot; you can pick it up in an afternoon and it really complements Python well since it excels at a lot of Python's weaknesses (parallelism, performance, static typing, static compilation, dependency managmenet, etc). For example, if I have to write a CLI tool, I almost always use Go since it's so much easier for coworkers to install a single binary than a Python program + dependencies + make sure you have the right version of the interpreter installed.

Oh I know Go, just haven't used it for numerical tasks.

If Add(x, y) is just as maintainable as x + y, why does Go use operators for the regular numeric types? Why have + at all?

Aside: Swedish does have the word 'kvarg', which is a product made out of sour milk. Some people eat it for breakfast but personally I can't stand it.

This is legitimately my favourite comment of the day.

Funny, in Dutch we call it kwark

At least the kwargs word is googleable. So it is relatively easy to find documentation. Unlike list comprehensions which are really hard to google until you know the name.

"for loop inside list python" seems to find a stackoverflow thread explaining them. It took me quite a while to bother trying that when I was first learning python though.

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