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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Aren't you contradicting yourself a bit?

First you claim functional languages are scary to look at, then say that you want Python to become more like functional languages. But maybe the reason Python is elegant and easier to read is exactly because Guido had the self-constraint to not go full functional. You also miss the part of the story where he actually did remove `reduce` from builtin, exactly because of how unreadable and confusing it is to most.

It's exactly that kind of decision making I expected from a BDFL, and I think Guido did a great job while he was one keeping Python from going down such paths.

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Well, the BDFL is probably the only dictator we all love.

Any decision he made is infinitely more than I could. Because I am just a python user, and an outsider in any decision making process. So for me, he's right all the time. That's a perfect definition of a dictator :)

But I do have wishes. It's like I love my parents but I do want to stay up late sometimes.

Yeah, I totally missed the part he removed reduce from builtin. Sorry about my memory. map, filter, or reduce, it does not matter. As I stated, some problems are better solved functional way. Because Python is such a friendly language, if it includes functional paradigm properly, it would make the functional part more readable than other functional languages.

FP is scary not because it has evil syntax to keep people at distance, it's just an alien paradigm to many. Lot's of non functional languages has functional support, which doesn't make them less readable. E.g. C#, JS. I suspect these languages have helped many understanding FP more. Python could make the jump by including more FP, but not turning into a full-fledged FP.

BTW. I'm still glad reduce is kept in functools.

> Because Python is such a friendly language, if it includes functional paradigm properly, it would make the functional part more readable than other functional languages.

I guess my argument is that Python is friendly exactly because it uses FP paradigms sparingly and conscientiously. Some paradigms such as map and filter can definitely make your code cleaner, while others (such as reduce) only lead to headaches. That being said as you mention we are getting pattern matching, I'm curious to see how that ends up.

i would argue that C# and JS do also use it sparingly and don't go too hard, but also that Python is generally a cleaner language than those. It's hard to know how much of it can be attributed to what, but generally, it's not a trivial thing to predict what impacts a given language feature will have on the readability of the code. A given FP paradigm might be cool in isolation, but when stacked with 4 other ones, it can quickly lead to gibberish code.

After giving some more thought on it. I just realized it was python got me into FP. Although the majority my projects are in C#, Linq never had me interested in FP.

You are right, C# and JS use FP sparingly. I think I expect more from Python because I enjoy writing in Python and my functional adventures were rooted in Python.

Personally, lambda expression is painful to look at. Many times I have deliberately avoided it. It's possible to make improvements, but it seems the FP part just stagnated. Looking forward to pattern matching though.

I was going to say something to that effect.

Functional programming is kind of cool unless it's someone else's code and you need to debug it.

I'd much rather debug someone's pure functional code rather than trying to figure out how someone's imperative code got into some unexpected/invalid state.

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