[Python-ideas] Make map() better

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 08:03:32PM +0200, Jason H wrote:

> But really, I've learned a few things along the way. Though nothing to 
> convince me that I'm wrong or it's a bad idea. It's just not liked by 
> the greybeards, which I can appreciate. "here's some new punk kid, get 
> off my lawn!" type of mentality. Dunning-Kruger, etc.

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein persons of low 
ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their 
cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory 
superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability 
persons to recognize their own ineptitude." -- Wikipedia.

If you're attempting to win us over to your side, stating that we're too 
stupid to realise how dumb we are is NOT the right way to do so.

But since you've just taken the gloves off, and flung them right in our 
faces, perhaps you ought to take a long hard look in the mirror. You've 
been told that at least some of the changes you're asking for are off 
the table because they will break working code. And that is still not 
enough to convince you that they are a bad idea?

Breaking thousands of Python programs just so that people coming from 
Javascript have only 99 differences to learn instead of 100 is not an 
acceptable tradeoff.

Adding bloat and redundant aliases to methods, especially using 
inappropriate names like "join" for append, increases the cognitive 
burden on ALL Python programmers. It won't even decrease the amount of 
differences Javascript coders have to learn, because they will still 
come across list.append in existing code.

So these aliases will be nothing but lose-lose for everyone:

- those who have to maintain and document them
- those who have to learn them
- those who have to answer the question "what's the difference between 
  list.append and list.join, they seem to do the same thing"
- those who have to read them in others' code
- and those who have to decide each time whether to spell it alist.join 
  or alist.append.


I'm sorry that Python's OOP design is not pure enough for your taste, 
but we like it the way it is, and the popularity of the language 
demonstrates that so do millions of others. We're not going to ruin what 
makes Python great by trying to be poor clones of Java, C++ or 
Javascript, even if it decreases the learning time for people coming 
from Java, C++ or Javascript by one or two minutes.

We're going to continue to prefer a mixed interface where functions are 
used for some operations and methods for others, and if that upsets you 
then you should read this:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html


-- 
Steve