Hi Evpok, Evpok Padding wrote:
Hi, All apologies if it has been clarified earlier, but if you dislike nested method calls what is wrong with operating on generators as in No worries! I think the theme of this discussion is using idioms from map, reduce + functions from itertools module themselves. And in my reply to Stephen: I think this boils down to the itertools module (was thinking about it over the weekend).
I find that the itertools module and some builtins like map, filter don't do themselves justice when chained together. It's okay for one or two function calls. But the design made it seem like it was never meant to be chained together (or was it?). Attempts to do so leads to code that must be read from right to left, making it an awkward API to use for transforming collections (which most of us might agree).
If it was indeed built for one or two function calls, then I would argue that it's not really a useable or practical module, because a lot of times we perform not just one or two but multiple transformations on collections.
So, to answer this question, I don't think the issue is whether the implementation is tricky such that the stdlib should do it. Rather, *our* itertools module itself is tricky to use, because fundamentally its design is not user-friendly, or rather limiting to the users. And this is a problem. Head over to StackOverflow and most people wouldn't recommend using it. It's not well-liked (except maybe by Lisp-ers). It's most probably because of what I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
What does this mean for us? I think it's a good opportunity for us to rethink the design to make it more usable. Hence, I'm putting the onus on us (stdlib), instead of relying on 3rd party libraries to improve on it.
As a proposal to improve the design, I suggested above a higher- level API for the itertools module that says "oh you want to use the itertools module? yeah it's a low-level module that is not meant to be used directly so here's a higher level API you can use instead." The implementation doesn't have to be method chaining because I'm generally proposing a higher-level API.
Now, I've said that the useability of the itertools module is a problem pretty much in a matter-of-fact manner and putting it on us to rework it. But what does everyone else think about this? Do you share the same concerns too? I mentioned something which I haven't before this: its usability and practicality. I feel like this is the elephant in the room that we could start discussing. And I think we shouldn't avoid it by giving alternatives. Again, these are some sentiments I gather as a Python user and StackOverflow user.