Hacker News Reader

Comment by softbuilder | Hacker News Reader

One of the solutions in the comments I found quite pythonic and concise. Somehow people have it in their heads that "Pythonic" means long-winded. And yes, you have to read the code and think for a second to understand it, but that's no crime.

  [(not x % 3) * 'Fizz' + (not x % 5) * 'Buzz' or x for x in range(1, 101)]

View on HN

Things taking longer to read and understand is perhaps the central crime of unmaintainable code, no matter how concise otherwise.

To quote Brian Kernighan, "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

I think this code is easier to read than the more verbose 12-line version given in the article. It takes longer to read per line, but less time total.

It's not just more complexity per line, it's also a higher level of complexity, using language-specific features that people who aren't fluent in python wouldn't be familiar with (multiplying a string by a boolean)

I'm fairly new to Python, though not to software development, and one of the nice things I find about Python is that when I see something I haven't seen before (in this case multiplying a string by a boolean) I can usually guess correctly what it will do and spend a few seconds with the REPL to confirm.

Of course, this is true to a certain extent of all programming languages, but I do find Python particularly easy in this respect.

By that logic, no one should write anything in idiomatic French because anyone who isn't fluent in French wouldn't be able to read it.

Well, that example is a bit different. You're ignoring who the audience is. When writing code, the audience is usually at least people on the same team, if not the person writing in the first place.

If writing in French for people who are not fluent, I think it would be a good idea to avoid idiomatic language.

It's not different. The audience in this case is people who are fluent in Python. Saying that code sample is bad is like saying Baudelaire is bad because only people fluent in French can read it.

I was curious about that. Is multiplying a string by a boolean idiomatic Python? I don't write nearly enough Python to know, but it strikes me that this might be more like writing French using lots of obscure words.

This starts to get into "what is idiomatic python?" which changes as the language evolves. For example, before Python had an official ternary form, this was a common idiom:

    account.status = ["paid", "unpaid"][amount_due > 0]

This does the same thing as the FizzBuzz example, coercing a bool to int. Here the int is used as an index into the list of the two strings.

Personally, I found this handy and liked it a lot. Others didn't and now there is this, which isn't bad:

   account.status = "unpaid" if amount_due > 0 else "paid"

Maybe it's less like using obscure French and more like speaking in a slightly different dialect, or in a different region with different cultural references.

Multiplying a string by an integer is fine.

Treating a boolean as an integer is iffy

Multiplying a string by a boolean frankly should be a no-no.

This way's easier to read:

    ['FizzBuzz' if 0 == n % 15 else 'Fizz' if 0 == n % 3
        else 'Buzz' if 0 == n % 5 else str(n) for n in range(1,101)]

Very nice.

If you make the generator always return a string, then you can make it print, thus:

    print '\n'.join((not x % 3) * 'Fizz' + (not x % 5) * 'Buzz' or str(x) for x in range(1, 101))

I like the solution, but I usually keep "The Zen of Python" in mind when writing 'Pythonic' code.

I've programmed Python before but I had to fire up a REPL to know that:

    True * "String"
    >"String"

And...

    not 0
    >True

I guess knowing the "truthiness" of all regular Python types is useful.

[concat $ replicate (fromEnum $ x `mod` 3 == 0) "Fizz" ++ replicate (fromEnum $ x `mod` 5 == 0) "Buzz" | x <- [1..101]]

let f = (replicate . fromEnum . (==0)) .: mod in [concat $ f x 3 "Fizz" ++ f x 5 "Buzz" | x <- [1..101]]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com