How complex is complex?

[Daniel Fetchinson]

>> > I understand that my question was foolish, even for a newbie.
>> > I will not ask any more such questions in the future.
>>
>> Gaaah! Your question was just fine, a good question on coding style.
>> I wish more people would ask such questions so that bad habits could
>> be avoided.
>>
>> The newbie posts that are annoying are the ones that:
>> - are answered on page 1 of any tutorial ("how do I get the second
>> character of a string?")
>> - are obvious homework assignments with no actual effort on the
>> poster's part ("how do I write a Python program to find the first 10
>> prime numbers?")
>> - pontificate on what is wrong with Python, based on 2 hours'
>> experience with the language (often titled "What's wrong with Python",
>> with content like "Python sucks because it doesn't have a switch
>> statement/has significant whitespace/doesn't check types of arguments/
>> isn't totally object-oriented like Java/doesn't have interfaces/...")
>> - are so vague as to be just Usenet noise (titled "Help me", with no
>> content, or "i need to write a program and don't know where to start
>> can someone write it for me?")
>>
>> I think Daniel's joke was on the rest of us, who each had to chime in
>> with our favorite dict processing algorithm.
>>
>> It *would* be good for you as a newbie to get an appreciation of the
>> topics that were covered in these responses, though, especially the
>> distinction between updating the dict in-place vs. creating a new
>> dict.
>>
> Daniel, Sorry for misunderstanding your post. I hope I was not being
> passive-aggresive - (also because I found that the second mechanism I
> provided was quite horrible :-), so I was indeed being foolish
> there. )

My point was exactly what somebody already mentioned: with such
subjective matters there is no way of deciding one way or another in a
rational way. What I found is that once you completely discard these
issues and don't waste brain cycles on them at all, but rather you
just go ahead and code, you will be actually sorting these things out
by yourself or put it in another way, these things will be sorted out
by themselves.

After all, GvR said things to the effect that the whole concept of
language design is not rational or objective or scientific, but rather
a big bag of gut feelings and I completely agree. Rationalizing about
these things is pretty dubious to me.

Have fun with python!
Daniel


> Paul/Aahz, I did understand 2 things
> (1) When using map always consider that the function will be called
> everytime, so the hit on the performance is more.
> (2) The second mechanism and the first mechanism provides different
> solutions (new dict/same dict)
> both of which I did not think about at all.
>
> Also, thank you everyone for all the help. I have been following this
> thread for the last 4 months (when I started with python) and I have
> learned a lot. The amount of help provided here is amazing.
>
> p.s. -> English is indeed not my first language :-)



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