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Comment by Sn3llius | Hacker News Reader

We don't see ourselves as Python bindings for the web, but instead as a pythonic way to create apps. I understand that "span" has become a well known name amongst web developers, that's just not something most new developers understand.

Think of it like how Python has renamed a lot of things. What other languages call arrays, Python calls lists. HashTables are dicts, and so on. Python has faced a lot of resistance here from people that got used to the more technical names, but I think the popularity of the language speaks for itself. Easy to understand, meaningful names are a plus, not a downside :D

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> that's just not something most new developers understand.

That is just false if you ask me. Eventually you reach the limits of the API defined by a framework and users will have to reach out to HTML and CSS. And now is there not only a level of indirection, but also all of the existing documentation from the Web Platform cannot be applied.

I think there is validity for having a Python based system (instead of JS) that runs on the client to render standard HTML and CSS, but this goes beyond that and will just become an immense scope creep.

Python lists aren’t arrays, right? They are the closest thing in Python to an array maybe, but they do a ton of stuff under the hood, like grow when needed.

Calling them arrays would be very confusing to everybody who expects a typical array: a pointer with some empty space after it.

Yeah and no? Python Lists indeed don't make any sort of array-like guarantee, but they're implemented as a vector/autogrowing-array of python object references (but these objects are not guaranteed to be cache-local).

The implementation defines the underlying data structure as PyObject *ob_item

List access is O(1), which effectively makes them arrays :)

Maybe if you don't consider CPU architecture, but most would expect to be able to do loops over Arrays that don't incur in a lot of cache misses, and Python Lists don't do that, since they're actually arrays of pointers to heap memory.

Most languages have arrays that grow automatically. I'd say C/C++ is the exception there.

When I said array, I specifically meant O(1) access, which is in contrast to linked lists, which the name "list" would seem to imply.

C++ has them on the standard library, I would make a clear split with C in this regard.

What connection do you think span has to text? To me, span is just the grouping element that defaults to display: inline. This can be used for text, but it can be used for about a million other things too. To me this looks like a fast path to a lot of docs that say “We aren’t actually putting any text in this element, but for legacy reasons it’s called Text. Version N+1 will rename it to Inline”.

A list is not an array. Each item is a pointer to what could be any type. There’s an array module if that’s what is needed.

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