Suffering For Your Art

mkx at excite.com mkx at excite.com
Sun Feb 25 04:02:26 EST 2001


On Sat, 24 Feb 2001 17:37:34 +0100, "Alex Martelli"
<aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:

>So does Python (I'm guilty of my share of "clever" solutions posted
>to this group), but in Python's case it's clearer that "being clever" is
>a temptation to be *wisely resisted* -- that "the simplest thing that
>can possibly work" is the RIGHT way to go (and I try to recall to
>point this out just about every time I come up with "cleverness"
>that would likely be a very bad idea to use in production code...:-).

I find that usually, if I have had enough sleep in the past week, I
can at lest _read_ most Python code posted by others with varying CQs
(clever quotients) {often reading is the 1st step in understanding}.
This was the first factor in swaying me to the language. I came from
another c.l.p* newsgroup, where more often than not, I could not tell
if the postings contained code or line-noise. And if I asked for
assistance in deciphering, I got hit with a big FAQ upside the head. 

I think that part of the art in Python is that clever code is most
often an elegant way to accomplish a task. In the past, I had spent
far too much time deciphering code where clever meant "difficult for
humans to comprehend."





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