On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 12:55:13AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer writes:
"Designed With Learning in Mind"
That's Python. Guido said so from the beginning,
Is it? Did he? Do you have references for that? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+%22Designed+With+Learning+in+Mind%22 I don't think that Python is "designed with learning in mind". Python is not Scratch, nor is it ABC. ABC was a *big* influence on the evolution of Python, but (in my opinion) at least half of that influence was to convince Guido *not* to make Python "designed with learning in mind". For example, ABC used its own alledgedly "beginner friendly" terminology that nobody else in programming used; Python mostly sticks to common terminology used by other languages which will be recognised by programmers coming from other languages. [...]
Footnotes: [1] For example, consider the dates of implementation of PEPs 3107 and 484. 3107 wasn't written by Guido, but he wanted and advocated it, and AIUI he always intended it to support something like 484.
Off-topic: I'm consistently and frequently frustrated by the community's use of PEP id numbers as jargon. I consider it to be a classic example of the use of jargon to exclude, rather than the sense of using it to streamline communication. They're like the old joke about the members of a club who have collected all their old jokes and funny anecdotes into a numbered list, so one need only announce "5379" and the club members will burst out into laughter. Great for those who have memorised the list, and perplexing and exclusionary to everyone else. They're worse than three- and four-letter acronyms, because at least acronyms have some connection to the English phrase (usually the initial letters) and you can often work out the meaning in context; but PEPs are arbitrary identifiers. Unless you have memorised the mapping from PEP ids to descriptions, there is nothing to link the id to the meaning. Apart from PEP 8, I don't know a single PEP id off by heart (not even the PEPs I have authored) and your footnote above reads as pure gobbledygook to me. There is not enough context to guess the meaning of 3107 or 484 (Guido intended 3107 to support 484 did he? how uninformative) so there is nothing to be done except to stop reading, switch to a browser, and google them both. And there are so many PEPs, most of which are of interest only to a tiny subset of the Python community, or old and obscure, that (apart from PEP 8) most of us don't even get the chance to memorise them through repetition. If I casually mentioned 317 into a conversation, how many people would know it was about prohibiting implicit exception instantiation? Here endeth the rant. -- Steven