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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

I have several decades of experience reading and using other people's code. When code is written at "master" level, that excludes most of the people who could generate business/social value out of using or improving it.

I appreciate the aesthetic beauty of great code. But it has a cost compared to average code.

This is doubly true for a language like Python, which occupies a niche of "lingua franca between users with wildly different backgrounds bringing value to the table by being able to use and change the same software".

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What you are talking about is not code that is written at a "master" level, what you are talking about is code that is clever. An important part of mastery is understanding what kind of code to write, when. Mastery means writing code that is easy for others to read and modify, when writing code in a professional setting. Mastery can also be writing clever code with "aesthetic beauty", in a different setting like an academic or personal project. But people who write clever inaccessible code while working professionally with a team have a few more steps to walk toward mastery.

Mastery of Python, in my opinion, is mastering "Pythonic" code, which incorporates readability as a fundamental tenet. In addition, the gigantic universe of not only the standard library but also numerous external libraries and tools, of which a master can leverage to undertake tasks both rapidly and efficiently.

So, to me, a Python zen master would not write incomprehensible code, but instead write readable code very quickly that effectively and efficiently solved the problem they are facing due to their comfort working inside the Python ecosystem.

My personal goal is to get as close to Norvig as possible for general Python code: https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/Advent%20o...

(short but exact comments, inline testing, good function and variable naming, overall good use but not overuse of the standard library, functions very rarely more than a dozen lines, generally understandable code)

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