Mark Summerfield wrote:
Hi,
Built-ins:
In an effort to keep the core language as small as possible (to keep it "brain sized":-) would it be reasonable to deprecate filter() and map() and to move them to the standard library as happened with reduce()? After all, don't people mostly use list comprehensions and generator expressions for these nowadays?
So you would put people through the pain of dealing with broken code and deprecation just so that people don't have to remember functions which you think they don't remember anyway? -1 Keeping the core language small is a benefit to core developers. It is not so much a benefit to users of the language -- if a programmer is only using the builtins, they are surely reinventing the wheel (and probably badly). To be an effective programmer, you surely are using functions and classes in the std lib as well as the builtins, which means you have to memorise both what the function is, *and* where it is. Shrinking the builtins while increasing the size of the std lib is not much of a human-memory optimization, and may very well be a pessimation. If you need a memory-jog, it is much easier to find builtins because they are always available to a quick call to dir(), while finding something in a module means searching the docs or the file system. -- Steven