[Chicago] The list

[Rob Kapteyn]

I know what you are feeling -- code-shame and the impostor syndrome -- but
that is NOT how Python became the center of a strong and vibrant community.

Read the Zen of Python again.
It is NOT a guide to some fictional pure "idiomatic" python.
It says:  "practicality beats purity."

I've been involved with python long enough to remember the "old days" of
python 2.1.
Back then, the Perl people would criticize Python because they could do
stuff in 10 characters that we needed 3 lines for,
the Ruby people would criticize Python because functions weren't first
class objects (they are today),  functional programming people criticized
the lack of "tail call optimization", and almost every other kind of
programmer hated the white-space requirement.

I loved python because it was clean, easy to understand and it let me get
things done.

It is telling that a lot of Python's most popular tools were NOT created by
computer scientists and were certainly NOT created
using the latest pythonic "idioms".  matplotlib and django come to mind.

Today, it looks to me like Perl and Ruby are slowly disappearing and a lot
of those people are coming to Python with their ultra-nerdy
greater-than-thou "right-way" attitude.

Ignore these people and just focus on getting something done.

It is good to know what is efficient and what isn't, but that is rarely a
real factor in any real project.
The "Zen" says nothing about efficiency and "idioms".

"Idioms" are good to know and are often very nice, but sometimes they
impose patterns that are not actually good for your project.

Sometimes, I knowingly write inefficient code -- think of to no-no of
"premature optimization" -- and smile ;)
That is closer to "the Python way" than this phony "idiomatic" fad that
seems to be hitting the Python world lately.

Just my opinion ;)
Rob







On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Mark Graves <mgraves87 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I echo all of the above sentiments and these are all things I'm interested
> in.
>
> I am personally here to learn from other's mistakes.  In my career (if you
> can call it that), its been less painful than re-creating them myself.
>
> I often code-shame
> <https://t.yesware.com/tt/6640a48a14dbdef70b47105ac6b72156559fc5a6/a1b00eac366e80f663deff964c4123a2/507935737f65dff5244388bd1603388d/hn.algolia.com/?query=code%20shame&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story>
> myself and typically suffer from impostor syndrome
> <https://t.yesware.com/tt/6640a48a14dbdef70b47105ac6b72156559fc5a6/a1b00eac366e80f663deff964c4123a2/b62037f86be97711a2e7dec23600b63c/hn.algolia.com/?query=impostor%20syndrome&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story> especially
> when people talk about the zen of python.  This has led me to contribute
> less to the open source community than I would have liked because I'm
> afraid people will ridicule my code.  I have even gone so far as to create
> fake github/bitbucket accounts and send pull requests.  Yep.  I'm that
> wierd.
>
> Python is such a fantastic and beautiful language, and I usually feel like
> my code doesn't live up to being called "pythonic".
>
> In that sense, I truly enjoy civil discussions around real world problems
> and how others approach them.  Seeing anti-patterns and how they are
> corrected to work is really useful to me as I try to grow my skills.
>
> While I find stack overflow / documentation / tutorials useful, there is
> just something useful about hearing feedback where the solution isn't
> posted.
> In particular, I don't have a formal computer science background, so
> topics of python's internals and effective memory management are
> particularly interesting to me.
>
> Similar to this:
>
>
> http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/10/sorting-million-32-bit-integers-in-2mb.html
> <http://t.yesware.com/tt/6640a48a14dbdef70b47105ac6b72156559fc5a6/a1b00eac366e80f663deff964c4123a2/c2e535ff606622773d047be7e9fc61eb/neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/10/sorting-million-32-bit-integers-in-2mb.html>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:55 PM, Bob Haugen <bob.haugen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:42 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > By "lurker" I don't mean I'm completely quiet, but rather that I'm
>> nowhere
>> > near Chicago, though I was born there and went to a Djangocon in some
>> swank
>> > hotel along the river (where I led a workshop before taking off on a
>> > pilgrimage to the home town of our O'Reilly School of Technology [1]).
>>
>> Hey! I went to that workshop. It was my introduction to Python. Helped
>> enormously! Thanks a lot, Kirby Urner!
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chicago mailing list
>> Chicago at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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