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Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "Epicycles"? Are you suggesting the code is written like this by random?

"Epicycles" may refer to ancient astronomers who started with the assumption that Earth is stationary and objects in the sky circle around it.

When observed planetary motions were found to be incompatible with the assumption, epicycles were introduced to keep the initial assumption working.

Yeah, sorry, I do know what epicycles are. I just don't understand the connection to this issue. It is not like predicate logic was invented to explain the behavior of Python.

I obviously failed to illustrate the connection the author maybe was referring to: it's an after-the-fact rationalisation, just like epicycles were.

I see many complicated explanations for "why all([]) behaves this way" that justify the behavior as good because of logical or mathematical purity. I am implying that these explanations are so long worded because they're wrong. I think they are good reasons for keeping the behavior as-is, but the code was probably written first and was written to be simple and just happens to produce mathematically consistent behavior at an edge case. It would be interesting to see the history of the function, to see if the implementation has changed.

> I am implying that these explanations are so long worded because they're wrong.

Are you my Intro to Operating Systems professor? Because he would take points away from answers on the exams for being more long-winded than necessary, even if the answer was correct.

Joking aside, your perspective is bizarre to me. You haven't offered any reasons to propose that all([]) should be False, but reject the given answers for it being True simply on the basis that the explanations are long-winded?

The question isn't "what should all([]) return", it's "why does all([]) return True". I think the answer is "because that's what the simplest implementation returns", not "because someone considered the mathematical implications".

Perhaps it happens to check for any false in the list and otherwise returns true. Sometimes mathematically pure is equivalent to simple and vice versa. The explanations are long because they try to explain the implications and make analogies, which could be infinite.

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