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kam

The PEP document describing the feature: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0584/

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> > Dict union will violate the Only One Way koan from the Zen.

> There is no such koan. "Only One Way" is a calumny about Python originating long ago from the Perl community.

For what it is worth, from https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/:

> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Personally, I’ve always thought that Python missed its Zen, both here and on “explicit is better than implicit.”

That ship had long sailed with string formatting anyways.

F-strings are the one obvious way to do string formatting. There may be other ways, for legacy backwards compatibility reasons, but f-strings are the way to do string formatting.

I think you are right. Just left a string of legacy (%-formatting) and dead end (.format()) solutions on the way there.

I think F-strings are bad for i18n. It sucks to use them with a database of string localizations because the variable name is now embedded in dozens of translated F-strings and basically becomes immutable.

Yes, unless a template is needed later. That's why the others continue to exist.

I disagree. In logging for example, ‘%s’ with the value as an argument to the logger is preferred because the formatting can be ignored if the log level is not sufficient to print.

Except log formatting isn’t the same as actually executing the expression passed to the logging function.

Log formatting is a different problem than string formatting. With log formatting you pass the formatting arguments as function parameters, which is completely different from any other way you format strings.

I think you're getting downvoted because logging is basically doing:

    def log(fmt, *args):
        print(fmt % args)

Hardly a huge change.

It sailed long before that.

Go back to 1.0 and we still had two ways to write strings ("abc" and 'abc'), and two ways to write not equal ("!=" and "<>").

The last died with 3.0.

But my point is that the Zen of Python must be seen as a post hoc description overlaid onto whatever the actual Python philosophy is. Aligned, certainly, but at times only roughly aligned.

So I don't see it as having sailed (with string formatting, or other specific even) but never having been there in the first place. More like, sailing in the same waters.

    The Tao that can be told
    is not the eternal Tao

    Can the Tao be found
    where there is no Tao?

It sailed with Turing completeness! At least, the popular interpretation of the phrase that ignores the word “obvious” did.

It sailed when they added the for loop - everyone was happy using while loops, things worked and it was simple.

Now there are TWO ways of calling a block of code repeatedly based? How confusing for new users. Python really went downhill since then.

I think go dropped one of these (for vs while) to keep to just one approach on loops so python providing lots of ways to do same thing is something other languages targeting entry level folks are seeking to avoid

Ah, so that's what the migration to Python 3 was all about!

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