Hacker News Reader

Comment by _dps | Hacker News Reader

Agree with everything you said here, but let me riff on this

> The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure.

I am reminded of the Emerson quip "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". The Py2 print statement is special/weird because it is a very important and special behavior, especially for newcomers. It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that deserves special treatment.

Py3 is more consistent, but less humane. I use it over Py2 only because the market has moved on, but every time I type print with parentheses I curse Guido.

View on HN

The funny thing is, if you type print with space it recognizes what you meant, and still wouldn't do it, raising an exception instead. It would've cost them literally nothing to support both ways to write print, since the parser has to detect statement print anyway.

Yes, but it would be a different way to do the same thing. It'd be anti-Pythonic.

> It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that deserves special treatment.

Can you expand on this, why is this more humane? And why should print be a special function?

Two simple reasons. First, "hello world" requires less explanation

  print "hello world"
  vs
  print ("hello world")

Second, printing a line to stdout is an extremely common and special activity (especially during debugging). There is almost no programmer-defined function you could write that has a function as fundamental as that of "print".

Larry Wall of Perl thought about these things in terms of Huffman Coding, i.e. the most common thing you might want to write should have the syntax elide any easily understood context.

In the case of "print", we know we're not talking about any random function here: it's the function for getting output to the terminal, one of the most fundamental operations in all of programming. So I think it's totally fine for it to have a special representation in the language.

Interesting, thanks.

One nit I would call-out is that most people don't put a space between the print and the ("hello world"), so idiomatically when learning, print is 'just another function'. And since HelloWorld is usually the first thing people learn, I wouldn't want them to think print is different than any other function.

Also, the first line of The Zen of Python is "Beautiful is better than ugly", I can understand why consistency was a priority here.

We could get into a whole other discussion about whether or not a programming language should have and adhere to a "culture", but fundamentally I agree with the arguments against Python making this change. It's just not worth the effort, and like others have said, they might've lost of a lot of momentum to JS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com