I come to praise .join, not to bury it...

[Alex Martelli]

"Erno Kuusela" <erno-news at erno.iki.fi> wrote in message
news:kuofvfjb77.fsf at lasipalatsi.fi...
> In article <982a4f0su3 at news1.newsguy.com>, "Alex Martelli"
> <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> | "Erno Kuusela" <erno-news at erno.iki.fi> wrote in message
>
> || what's wrong with vague aesthetic?-) if lots of people share it,
> || it's not to be dismissed so lightly.
>
> | Lots of people share the 'vague aesthetic' of desiring
> | to use braces instead of whitespace to delimit blocks
> | of statements, for example.
>
> | Python dismisses that lightly, and that is definitely
> | a part of what makes it such a wonderful language.
>
> it could also be argued that python uses whitespace instead
> of braces because of vague aesthetic shared by lots of people. :)

If it's "shared by lots of people", how come Python, Haskell and
Occam -- languages which, between them, may account for _maybe_
10% of the world's programmers (much fewer, I suspect) -- are
the only ones to support such whitespace-for-grouping usage...?

Fortunately, Python's choices are not determined by majority
voting, but by our benevolent dictator -- whose good sense of
design, despite the lapse of print>>, is clearly of the highest
order.  I consider the choice of making .join a method of the
joiner object one more example of that excellent design-sense.


Alex