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

[Michael Hudson]

strange place to be having this conversation...

Martijn Faassen <faassen at infrae.com> writes:

> 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.

Is this the jim-bobo branch?  Seems fairly quiet...

> One main problem with Zope 3 right now is that the initial learning
> curve to get a "Hello world" going is too big; 

Yes.  Hardly "instant gratification"...

> 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. :)

Oh!

>> 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.

Well, I'm currently lurking on zope3-users & -dev (via gmane).  Not
sure I have the energy to dive in right now...

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  But maybe I've just programmed in enough different languages to
  assume that they are, in fact, different.
     -- Tony J Ibbs explains why Python isn't Java on comp.lang.python