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Comment by jherdman | Hacker News Reader

Count me as one of those people that don't get it. If I'm joining the elements of an array together, I'm operating on the array. Therefore I _expect_ the join() method to be on the array.

To me, Python can't seem to make up its mind with these weird (IMHO) stand-alone methods like join(), sum(), any(), etc. That's the kind of thing I'd expect in a functional language, not in an OO language.

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The thing is, they aren't methods. They really aren't. They don't operate on an object using the object's local data. They are generic functions that use certain defined interfaces that many objects define.

"list.join(str)" and "str.join(list)" are not the same. The list.join syntax only works for lists, but str.join takes any sequence, which is anything that implements the sequence protocol, including lists, dicts, sets, trees, heaps, iterators in general, and a limitless variety of user-defined sequences. Once you understand that it's not a matter of picking two spellings of the same functionality, but actually radically different functionality between the two spellings. (Putting this on string rather than it being a free-floating function is perhaps dubious, but at least the operation does have a sort of irreducible stringy-ness to it in a way that it does not have a listy-ness to it.)

If you make the "join" a method of list, then you have grotesquely cut its functionality. Now you are requiring people to implement their own join on every other object that implements the sequence protocol, which is just silly. (Of course if they have other needs they may still implement something else, but why not give them the option of the default?)

This is generic-programming through duck-types, not OO. Similarly for all the other examples you cite and quite a few more; putting them on "list" is not "the sensible thing to do", it would be a grave error.

    Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, May  7 2008, 15:19:09)
    ...
    >>> ", ".join(str(x) for x in xrange(10))
    '0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9'

That's not a list in there.

Well join should be on sequence instead of list then.

To me it seems unnatural to see join on string because string feels more 'basic' than a sequence, so I would expect the sequence to know about strings rather than the opposite. But the argument against join on string is not as strong as the argument against sum on array.

This is such a non-issue. Really. The parent posted the reasoning behind the decision, that reasoning is sound. Your disagreement is purely aesthetic, there's simply no practical reason why the current way is wrong. Please just accept that this is how it is, and stop complaining about it. Please?

Python is intended to be aesthetically pleasing in some sense, so I don't think aesthetic objections to some of its features are unwarranted.

This isn't one of the 'some'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed

I don't think this is bike-shedding. That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues.

In this case, their objection is that it violates their intuition, but the placement of join is a natural result of how Python's types are defined. Defining join on all sequences would have real (annoying) implications.

That applies when people argue over two functionally equivalent options, often to the detriment of more important issues.

How does that not fit this situation? Because there's actually a good technical reason to do it the way it's currently done? Wouldn't that imply that there should be even less discussion of it?

No, because the discussion should be explaining that good technical reason. Which is what happened.

Bike-shedding is when the arguments have relatively the same merit, and the choice makes little difference in the end. I don't think either applies.

An example of bike-shedding in this context would be renaming join to fuse.

Bike-shedding is when someone feels the need to interject their opinion simply because the topic is something they feel they understand, regardless of whether that interjection actually contributes anything.

Bitching that '\n'.join(alist) should be alist.join('\n') is a favorite pastime of people who want to demonstrate that they've heard of OO programming. It's a perfect example of bike-shedding.

When I use the term, I assume both sides have marginal arguments - so the resulting discussion is a waste of time. I use it this way to remind a group that we're not discussing something important. But if one of the sides has merit, than it's important for the other side to understand that.

You can't just make up your own definition of a well-known term and then call people wrong when they use it correctly:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/u...

I think my interpretation is the more common one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed

http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding

All of these definitions require the issue to be of marginal benefit to the overall problem. The observation that people feel the need to contribute their opinion on matters they feel they know about is why bikeshedding happens, but it's not bikeshedding itself.

You said "When I use the term...", a little phrase implying personal subjective interpretation, and that's was what I was responding to when I said "you can't just make up your definition", but okay, scratch that part.

The more important point was that you can't call someone wrong when they're using the actual, original definition correctly, which I was (the link I included was how the term entered the geek lexicon).

I said that because, at that point, I realized we had a difference of definition, and I didn't know which one was more common. Having looked at it, I think what I say is the accepted definition - regardless of the origin.

But. All of this is a digression. The entire reason I said I don't think this is bikeshedding is because I think there's value in discussing why join is a member of strings and not sequences in Python. Understanding this point helps in understanding Python's design.

I find it really amusing that this has degenerated into a debate over the meaning of bikeshedding. Talk about bikeshedding!

A part of me wants to keep it going just for the irony value.

I recognized the irony, but well, bikeshedding. Can't resist.

That was my point when I started the thread. The Python decision is objectively justified for technical reasons. Yet a large number of people viscerally feel it's wrong. I blame human irrationality - but then, programming languages are meant for humans, so shouldn't they accommodate our irrationality? Otherwise, you get something like Haskell. ;-)

BTW, there are other cases where Python has gone the other way. Multiline lambdas, for instance. The case against multiline lambdas is essentially that they look ugly - they let you embed an indentation-sensitive block in what might be a parenthesized expression, which means you need some dangling delimiters. But they're certainly useful, as Scheme/Lisp/Ocaml/etc. have shown.

It's similar to the compare-constants-from-the-left idiom in languages where assignment is a valid expression (notably C). If you always write "if (NULL == foo)" instead of "if (foo == NULL)", you eliminate a whole class of bugs. But I've seen very few programmers do this, because it "feels" wrong to a lot of people.

I completely agreed with your original point. The fact that we went from your comment to people actually bitching about join made me really sad.

I shouldn't have said that the join argument was "purely aesthetic", I should have said that it was "purely aesthetic and trivial", because you're right, aesthetics are important, and (imo) are reason enough to disallow multiline lambdas. How do you cross the line from trivial to not? I don't know exactly, but I do know that swapping the position of the involved nouns and taking up the same number of characters for a good technical reason doesn't.

"if (NULL == foo)" and "'\n'.join(lines)" both feel wrong because you are putting the most complicated object last. The most complicated thing should go first so you can sooner figure out what the heck this line of code is talking about.

I would support making the C compiler just disallow "if (x = y)".

OTOH, in languages that support first-class functions, it's pretty common to put the functional argument last because then it can wrap to another line without leaving dangling parameters:

    $.each(my_array, function(val) {
      // Do something
      // Do something else
    });

That's putting the most complicated object last, and feels much more natural than:

    $.each(function(val) {
      // Do something
      // Do something else
    }, my_array);

I suspect it's more that English has trained us to read "noun verb object" sentences. In an if statement, `foo` feels like the subject, and then "== NULL" is the predicate. In an array map, the array is the subject, and the function is the predicate. In the Python join example, the array feels like the subject, "join" is the verb, and "," is the object, which is what makes it seem so awkward. Ruby's array.sum feels more natural because the array is the subject and sum is an intransitive verb.

That's just the thing: there is no sequence class in Python. There's only a sequence concept. A sequence is any object that implements a particular interface. Strings aren't more basic than the concept of a sequence in Python; strings are a type of sequence.

See http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#iterator-types and http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#http://docs.pyt...

I anticipated this objection if you go back and re-read my post, but I'll blow out the point a bit more here: In Java terms, "sequence" is an interface.

You can't put join there. Because then you have to put add, any, none, all, reduce, filter, and so on and so forth for at least another ten or twenty base methods (ignoring everything else that applies just to the sequence protocol written by users), which every single implementation would then have to provide. No matter how abstractly beautiful it may be that this implements object-orientation dogma, in practice it's an idea too stupid to even begin to consider.

Thankfully there is this concept of mixins (and, gasp, multiple inheritance), to solve some of these issues.

I think, the join-akwardness in python mostly is a single-dispatch issue. Both variants, glue.join(sequence) and sequence.get_joined_by(glue) make some sort of sense, however, neither strikes all readers as the one obvious thing that obviously is right. (Compare similar single dispatch issues like: Will the employee have a add_to_department or will the department have a get_new_employee?) Thus, I think, the cleanest solution would be a generic method join(glue, string) so you just call join('\n', lines). This removes the question if the glue is more responsible in the join process or if the sequence is more important in the join process, because both are equally important.

The reason join() isn't a method on lists is that it would mean that every class that wants to act like a list would have to implement it (or inherit from someone who does).

If you write your own class that is iterable but doesn't inherit from list, it would not have a join() method unless you wrote one. But it works as an argument to '\n'.join() for free since that can operate on anything iterable.

The other problem with sticking methods like join(), sum() and any() onto collections is that whenever a new method is added (for example, any() was added in python 2.5), it would cause confusion for anyone who has a list-like class that happens to have a method with that name that does something different.

I agree with you if you mean that an array should be able to abstractly reduce its elements, but I'd argue that the specifics of how the array gets reduced are generally outside of the responsibility of the array class.

In Ruby, this is accomplished through Array#inject, which allows you to specify the procedure that gets applied as you're joining. This makes it easy to do summing, string concatenation, etc, etc.

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