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Comment by Mawr | Hacker News Reader

> He just didn't like the concept of long anonymous functions.

And rightfully so. If a function is long enough to need multiple lines, it's also long enough to be named.

Complaints about this seem to come from the functional language circles, where chaining 10 .filter()'s, .map()'s, etc. together in a single line is considered not only normal, but desirable and idiomatic. Why bother naming the intermediate results, right?

The ability to stuff a million operations on a single line that, for whatever reason, seems so coveted by many is quite clearly one of the least important aspects of language design. Vertical space is cheap and plentiful. Human brain capacity is tiny. Therefore, optimize for readability not clever one-liners.

This is the big benefit of a BDFL, having single a person with good taste be able to veto bad ideas. Guido, for the most part, has good taste so Python's ended up quite well designed.

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I don’t think it’s a strong argument coming from a language that will happily allow some gnarly nested list comprehensions

> Complaints about this seem to come from the functional language circles, where chaining 10 .filter()'s, .map()'s, etc. together in a single line is considered not only normal, but desirable and idiomatic.

To go full circle, pandas, an extremely popular python library, forces you to do exactly that, because the straightforward imperative loop is slow as a glacier.

> This is the big benefit of a BDFL, having single a person with good taste be able to veto bad ideas. Guido, for the most part, has good taste so Python's ended up quite well designed.

Good taste would be having proper lambdas. Python is a very inconsistent language and among the last things I am reminded of when I think "good taste".

> If a function is long enough to need multiple lines, it's also long enough to be named.

As a user of other languages, but only occasionally of Python, this type of reasoning (arbitrary limits because we think if you exceed them you’re probably structuring your code wrong) is totally alien to me. Why should the language have opinions about how I should or shouldn’t structure my code?

Imagine if Rust or C++ had an arbitrary rule that you couldn’t have more than 10 functions in a class/impl; maybe it’d usually be correct style but people would still think the language making it a hard restriction was ridiculous.

"Why should the language have opinions about how I should or shouldn’t structure my code?"

Isn't that what attracts so many people to Python in the first place - that it does have strong opinions, and often enforces them on how people should structure their code.

Python, in many places, optimizes for readability, rather than flexibility, and there is a community of users that really appreciate that. Not to say the feeling is universal (clearly isn't) - but it's at least an answer to the "why?"

> Isn't that what attracts so many people to Python in the first place - that it does have strong opinions, and often enforces them on how people should structure their code.

I seriously doubt it. What attracts people to Python is that:

1. It has a big standard library and until the last ~10 years installing 3rd party packages was beyond the capabilities of your average CS student.

2. It is easy to write relative to C++. If you're in data science, those are your two options, so you choose Python.

Python is an extremely loose language - it's not restrictive at all in ways that matter. Is "you can't use two lines (unless you use a \)" restrictive when your language lets you arbitrarily replace functions at runtime?

It's not at all a readable language imo. It is very much write-optimized. It has tons of code golfing and one liners.

> It's not at all a readable language imo. It is very much write-optimized. It has tons of code golfing and one liners.

Agreed. This might have been applied to the "Zen of Python" days back in 1999, when the competition was Perl, but python has slowly morphed into a more and more perl-like language.

It's not at all a readable language imo.

Compared to what? Python's closest peers are arguably the members of the P*-family of programming languages (Perl, Python, PHP, with Ruby as honorary member), and among that group, Python traditionally skews towards the readability end of the spectrum.

Compared to languages without inheritance and with types, primarily. Dynamic typing + inheritance leads + a lot of one liners leads to really hard to read code.

Eh. Complex Ruby can be much more readable than complex modern Python. PHP and Perl, sure, usually.

What attracts people to Python is the fact people have already solved most problems and they can just import the stuff they need.

> it does have strong opinions, and often enforces them on how people should structure their code

Like what? Where else does Python arbitrarily limit how many tokens may be part of a particular construct, or do anything else remotely similar?

> If a function is long enough to need multiple lines, it's also long enough to be named.

I once believed that, but I now think it’s a terrible mistake. Python ends up encouraging classes instead but classes are a much worse abstraction than an anonymous function.

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