Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

It’s only weird syntactically. Python tends to lean towards intuitive, natural language by default. I would have assumed they’d have created a syntactically straightforward alternative, like:

__this_file__ == “__launch_file__”

or similar. I understand python values “only one way” of doing things, but it would be helpful for readability.

View on HN

No, the “readable” shortcut would have been

    if __main__:

There are no magic strings to remember and the IDE can help you look up variables.

Again, this is a CS/Math major kind of thinking. The term __main__ means nothing syntactically. If we care about language acquisition -- thus language adoption -- it is always better to make "very common terms" in the language understandable to someone who is completely illiterate to your formal language.

I honestly think one of the main reasons why python is so successful is as simple as:

    print "Hello world!"

...and later:

    print("Hello world!")

It might not seem like much, but when you're asking someone to pick up a language outside of a classroom setting, it's just much more intuitive than:

    echo "Hello world!";

or:

    console.log("Hello world!");

or god forbid:

    public class GFG{

        public static void main(String[] args) {

            System.out.println("Hello world!");

        }

    }

These little things matter in the long run, even if they don't seem like they matter when you're already fluent.

Idk what's better, console.log or print, cause way back as a beginner I was confused what it means to print something. Like with ink? They're both ok, unlike the C++ or Java ways.

But Python breaking hello world in version 3 was crazy.

Again, I would argue “very common commands” like printing text should be so unbelievably intuitive that beginners can use them even before learning what a “console” is, why there are “logs” and how dot notation works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com