

What is Pythonic? (2005) - codeoclock
http://blog.startifact.com/posts/older/what-is-pythonic.html

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trjordan
I think it's important to think of Pythonic as something that's subjective and
evolving.

The C examples given are idiomatic in C. The reason they're idiomatic is
because they fit with a mental model that most of the C community uses: data
structures in an enumerated address space, and passing around hunks of mutable
memory with handshake semantics. If your code interacts with code that was
written with that in mind, life should be pretty good.

Python has the same sort of thing, but at a different level of abstraction:
objects, frequently enumerated by identity, grouped together by user-defined
abstractions, with the understanding that function side effects are rare,
unless they're object methods.

Haskell is arguably cleaner / terser, but it's yet another set of idioms. The
only thing that makes pythonic Python is that it's used by the rest of the
community. It's a shared understanding that's neither better or worse than any
other shared understanding.

~~~
pekk
You can't have this both ways. Either what is 'Pythonic' is subjective and
community-based AND your arguments about Haskell are also subjective and based
on the Haskell community, or some things are just better than others both
within Python and among languages.

But even in the second case, you have to do more than wave your hands around
to show that Haskell is superior if you want to move beyond pure, substance-
less snobbery. If you did that, you'd find that you were leaning on some
assumed values - for example, the values of the Haskell community.

If all you have to say is that Python's values are subjective while Haskell's
values are the actually important ones, this is really pure snobbery without
any substance.

~~~
marvy
I don't think trjordan said anything like that.

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makmanalp
Nice overview. I think a lot of the tenets of pythonicness are based on the
heuristic that there should be minimal cruft and friction between the reader
and the code. I should be looking at a reasonably close approximation of my
interpretation of the problem. Was it let or var? Semicolon or no semicolon?
Was it := or set! <\- or <<\- ? Squiggly braces or none? Does the second
indented line after a non-squiggly block count as part of the block? Was it
private static or static private? Does const go before or after the function
definition? Does i++ increment first or provide a value first? I should have
to think less about any of these things and more about the problem.

Usually, syntax is minimal enough to get out of your way, and where there is
syntax, it attempts to be consistent and to enforce clarity.

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jimmaswell
In most of those cases there's no point thinking of them, just type the first
one that comes to mind and move on

~~~
gmu3
I hate poorly styled code. Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted for
this. That kind of mentality inherently churns out bad code.

~~~
jimmaswell
They're all inconsequential to code quality except for some like i++ vs ++i
which isn't even style, it's syntax. preincrement before, postincrement after,
not hard to remember

~~~
gmu3
Syntax and style are tightly coupled in Python. It's not hard to remember i++
is the same as i+=1 or that if(bool) { can optionally have a line break
between the guard and the brace. In other languages, you have more choices. If
you have more choices and just type what comes to mind first, you're going to
get stylistic inconsistencies.

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bluedino
I submitted a related link before - Unpythonic Python

[http://skien.cc/blog/2014/04/09/unpythonic-
python/](http://skien.cc/blog/2014/04/09/unpythonic-python/)

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ghshephard
The article mentions Zope quite a bit - which was a big thing for a company I
worked for in 2001 (Loudcloud), as we had a number of customers that wanted to
use it. Whatever happened to Zope? Wikipedia seems to suggest there hasn't
been much development in the last 4 years - anybody know?

~~~
TylerE
Zope the framework really fell out of favor. Some of the good bits were pulled
out and built into Repoze.bfg, which later merged with pylons (used by reddit
etc) to become Pyramid.

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echion
We might be in the "post-pythonic" Python era. There was a discussion a few
months back on #python to the effect that judging "pythonic"-ness was a
shibboleth indicating the judger was _not_ the best Python community member.
Wish I could find a log.

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quick111
I have a lot of love for python but when I want to achieve something that is
easy in other languages but not available in Python because "thats not
Pythonic" for some reason I think Stockholm Syndrome.

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dustingetz
Functional is the new pythonic!

(edit: It actually is, half of the good things in Python, like list
comprehensions and tuples and destructuring, were first seen in functional
languages!)

~~~
sp332
BDFL Guido van Rossum is not in favor of adding functional programming stuff
to python. So, by fiat, functional programming is not very pythonic. :)

~~~
TorKlingberg
You are both partially right. List comprehensions are considered pythonic, and
they are similar to map and filter from the FP world. However the map and
filter functions themselves are somewhat unpythonic.

~~~
omaranto
I guess list comprehensions in Python are, as you say, similar to map and
filter from the FP world, but they are even more similar to... list
comprehensions from the FP world.

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icebraining
(2005)

