map

[elsa]

On Aug 31, 11:44 pm, Hendrik van Rooyen <hend... at microcorp.co.za>
wrote:
> On Monday 31 August 2009 11:31:34 Piet van Oostrum wrote:
>
> > But ultimately it is also very much a matter of taste, preference and
> > habit.
>
> This is true, but there is another reason that I posted - I have noticed that
> there seems to be a tendency amongst newcomers to the group to go to great
> lengths to find something that will do exactly what they want, irrespective
> of the inherent complexity or lack thereof of that which they are trying to
> do.
>
> Now I cannot understand why this is - one could say that it is caused by an
> eagerness to understand all the corners of the tool that is python, but
> somehow it does not feel like that to me - I see it almost as a crisis of
> confidence - as if the newbie lacks the self confidence to believe that he or
> she is capable of doing anything independently.  
>
> So whenever I can, I try to encourage people to just do it their way, and to
> see what happens, and to hack using the interactive interpreter, to build
> confidence by experimenting and making mistakes, and realizing that when you
> have made a mistake, it is not the end of the world,  - you can fix it and
> move on.
>
> Don't know if this rant makes any sense...
>
> - Hendrik

in my own defense - firstly, I was able to implement what I wanted to
do with loops, and I used this to solve the problem I needed to.

However, by asking *why* map didn't work, I now understand how map
works, what contexts it may indeed be useful for, and what the
alternatives are. To boot, you have all given me about 10 different
ways of solving the problem, some of which use prettier (and probably
faster) code than the loops I wrote...