On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 at 01:15, Tim Peters <tim.peters@gmail.com> wrote:
It's fair enough, although rather than "wrong" I'd say more that it's inappropriately applying design principles that work well in most of Python's libraries to an area where they don't. The very fact that half the itertools docs are devoted to "recipes" kinda suggests it knows it's leaving its intended audience hanging ;-)
I'm with Tim on pretty much everything he's said in this thread.
I do like functional languages, and always have, so it seems to fall on me here to advocate for what those weirdos value. In part, no, the itertools namespace is not a precious resource that must be vigilantly minimized ;-)
I'm also fond of functional languages. Just because Tim argues so eloquently, doesn't mean he's the only one who feels like this :-) Not having first() won't ruin any of my code, but having it would definitely remove one of the "speed bumps" I occasionally hit when writing scripts. (The same is true of many of the itertools recipes, BTW). Paul