Well, that example is a bit different. You're ignoring who the audience is. When writing code, the audience is usually at least people on the same team, if not the person writing in the first place.
If writing in French for people who are not fluent, I think it would be a good idea to avoid idiomatic language.
It's not different. The audience in this case is people who are fluent in Python. Saying that code sample is bad is like saying Baudelaire is bad because only people fluent in French can read it.
I was curious about that. Is multiplying a string by a boolean idiomatic Python? I don't write nearly enough Python to know, but it strikes me that this might be more like writing French using lots of obscure words.
This starts to get into "what is idiomatic python?" which changes as the language evolves. For example, before Python had an official ternary form, this was a common idiom:
This does the same thing as the FizzBuzz example, coercing a bool to int. Here the int is used as an index into the list of the two strings.
Personally, I found this handy and liked it a lot. Others didn't and now there is this, which isn't bad:
account.status = "unpaid" if amount_due > 0 else "paid"
Maybe it's less like using obscure French and more like speaking in a slightly different dialect, or in a different region with different cultural references.
