Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer writes:
Education is one side of it. It's about intuitive API
Problem is, just the reactions to examples given in this thread demonstrate that personal intuition varies substantially. To identify the "intuitions" that reach the largest audience, the only halfway objective measure I can think of is to try it out on a large number of new users, which is another way of saying "in an educational context." Why "new" users? Because experienced users will have their "intuition" informed by their experience with "traditional" ways of expression as codified in identifiers and syntax. For example, while augmented assignment turns out to be useful to provide mutating operations and signal them to the reader, the increment operation is purely syntactic sugar compared to "i += 1" as a statement, but insufficiently powerful and orthogonal as an expression to add to Python. Yet C-experienced users frequently requested the increment operator. Similarly, Guido resisted an expression form of assignment for more than a decade, for good reason (at least according to *his* intuition), and finally came to support it when persuasive use cases other than "while i := i + 1:" were proposed. The same kinds of effects will occur for "within Python" tradition. So the purest "intuition" can presumably be observed with new programmers, while experienced programmers new to Python will at least not be steeped in Python's traditional Kool-Aid. Steve