On 2018-05-07 09:17, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
I'm arguing that for some people, your preferred syntax*is* more distracting and hard to comprehend than the more self-descriptive version with named functions. And its not just a matter of*learning* the API, it is a matter of using it so often that it ceases to look weird and looks natural.[1]
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But if you think it isn't distracting, I think you are mistaken, and I think we ought to show caution in making it a built-in or an offical part of the module API.
As an aside, this has some parallels with the recent thread about "objectively quantifying readability". Saying things like "you are mistaken" implies that there is an objective ground truth about what is distracting and what is not. And personally I agree that there is such an objective ground truth, and that it is based on facts about human pyschology (although I don't think I agree with you about this particular case). Of course, there may be differences in how individuals react to things, but there is a real sense in which different syntaxes, constructs, etc., have something like a "mean level of confusion" which represents how easy to deal with people in general find them on average, and by which they can be meaningfully compared. I'm not sure how to proceed to uncover this (unless the PSF starts funding psychological experiments!), but I do think it would be good if we could find ways to get at something like hard evidence for claims about whether things "really are" distracting, readable, unreadable, intuitive, etc.