[Chicago] The list

[Randy Baxley]

Go Rob.  Get things done.  You need to put this out as a miniblog that can
be tweeted and otherwise socialized

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 8:08 PM, Rob Kapteyn <robkapteyn at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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