[EuroPython] What the heck does "pythonic" mean?

[Martijn Faassen]

Michael Hudson wrote:
> Martijn Faassen <faassen at infrae.com> writes:
> 
>>In Zope 3, a lot of effort was taken to allow the integration of
>>Pythonic code. Zope 3's codebase itself is also a lot more modern
>>Python, so could qualify as "Pythonic" as well. Unfortunately
>>turn-offs for Python developers new to Zope 3 are ZCML 
> 
> Bloody hell yes.
>  
>>and the sheer magnitude of the framework and the amount of new
>>concepts involved. I believe something like ZCML is necessary,  

> That something like ZCML is necessary to deploy large systems I'm not
> prepared to dispute, but that it (seems to be?  currently?) is
> necessary to do even toy development with zope 3 is a serious turn
> off.

Agreed -- there has been some work on a bobo for Zope 3 that might fix 
this. I haven't checked it out myself, but it might be fun to experiment 
with this to see how far we can take this.

One main problem with Zope 3 right now is that the initial learning 
curve to get a "Hello world" going is too big; too much framework stuff 
needs to be done, even though the framework stuff *is* separated out 
from the Python code.

> When I got to the point in the Zope 3 Book where it says "simply type
> these 70 lines of XML into browser/configure.zcml" I might have thrown
> it out of the window if I wasn't reading it in PDF :)

Heh, I can imagine that. It's also not didactically correct; the minimal 
amount of ZCML needed to get *something* going can be cut down to, I 
think, 4 or 5 lines. :)

> Shane Hathaway put it very neatly in:
> 
>     http://hathawaymix.org/Weblog/2005-01-26
> 
> (especially his comment).
> 
> I guess this is known, and Zope 3 will get there in the end.

Repeating this can't hurt at all; I believe it certainly won't hurt 
anything if the core developers get signals like this more often.

Regards,

Martijn