[Chicago] The list

Mon Feb 22 11:44:49 EST 2016

And by the way Knuth had a lisp ( there is no dot on my keyboard (((((
language }}}}}} on purpose that made him hard to understand.(apply polish)

Nothing to do with my own lisp when I was young and also stuttered which I
still do often.  Speech Therapy

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 10:36 AM, Randy Baxley <randy7771026 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Chicago mailing list
>>> Chicago at python.org
>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chicago mailing list
>> Chicago at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20160222/2dd62d67/attachment.html>