[Tutor] seniority

[Avi Gross]

Steven,

Good question. I do not know how long and in what capacity many people have been involved with anything, including Python in some form. I do know a bit about Alan and plenty about myself. I was saying that I would take seriously what was said by people LIKE Alan because they had more experience and perhaps more internal knowledge than someone like e who took an introductory course in Python maybe five years ago then went on to many other languages and only came back recently and is doing some serious studying. 

The main difference between me and others here with questions is that I am in the general category Alan mentioned of someone with a mindset that has been very hospitable to mathematics and an algorithmic way of thinking. But that does not give me much knowledge in an experiential sense other than what I have read.

And, some of my resources are out of date. Last night I watched several talks by David Beazley that Mats pointed out and plan on doing some more. He kept talking about revolutionary changes in release 3.6 and I note I am now using a 3.7 variant. He suggested you use these such as the f-string or depending on dictionaries to be in the order things were added and so on. My thought was that this would disrupt anyone running not just 2.X but any older version of 3.X but that may have been his point. You may think you know the language, but it is like layers of the onion and some of your favorite features were definitely not in place way back when the people with seniority got into it.

Watching him rapidly improvise code live, I also saw how some people can make ever deeper abstractions come to life in ways that even sort of add features to the language if used right. He did an entire talk on using classes and metaclasses and decorators to change the useless annotations added to the language that don't actually check if arguments to functions (or in classes) are of the type or condition expected, such as a positive integer, to one where the invisible wrappers created will check implicitly and return errors.

It is very possible to write programs that others may not easily understand just using existing features, let alone as it keeps evolving.

Rushing out, as usual. Today is Thanksgiving in my part of the world so will reply to the rest of the message another time.

Avi
-----Original Message-----
From: Tutor <tutor-bounces+avigross=verizon.net at python.org> On Behalf Of Steven D'Aprano
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2018 1:06 AM
To: tutor at python.org
Subject: Re: [Tutor] origins bootstrapped.

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 11:31:59AM -0500, Avi Gross wrote:

> Alan has been involved with Python for a long time so he has more to 
> offer historically.

I've been involved with Python for a long time too. What exactly are you trying to say?

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