[Python-ideas] __len__() for map()

[E. Madison Bray]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 7:16 PM Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 2:44 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> > You might say that your users are not so advanced, or that they're naive
> > enough not to even know they could do that, but that's a pretty unsafe
> > assumption as well as being rather insulting to your own users, some of
> > whom are surely advanced Python coders not just naive dabblers.
>
> I think that what above all unites Sage users is knowledge of
> mathematics. Use of Python would be secondary. The goal surely is to
> discover and develop conventions and interface that work for such a
> group of users. In this area the original poster is probably the
> expert, and I think should be respected as such.
>
> Steve's post divides Sage users into "advanced Python coders" and
> "naive dabblers". This misses the point, which is to get something
> that works well for all users. This, I'd say, is one of the features
> of Python's success. Most Python users are people who want to get
> something done.
>
> By the way, I'd expect that most Sage users fall into the middle range
> of Python expertise. I think that to focus on the extremes is both
> unhelpful and divisive.

Yes, thank you.  They are all very smart people--most of them much
moreso than I.  The vast majority are mathematicians first, and
software developers second, third, fourth, or even further down the
line.  Some of the most prolific contributors to Sage barely know how
to use git without some wrappers we've provided around it (not that
they couldn't learn, but let's be honest git is a terrible tool for
anyone who isn't Linus Torvalds).  They still write good code and
sometimes brilliant algorithms.  But they're not all Python experts.

Many of them are also students who are only using Python because Sage
uses it, and not using Sage because it uses Python.  The Sagebook [1]
may be their first introduction to Python, and even then it only
introduces Python programming in drips and drabs as needed for the
topics at hand (e.g. variables, loops, functions).  I'm trying to
consider users at all levels.

[1] http://dl.lateralis.org/public/sagebook/sagebook-ba6596d.pdf