boring the reader to death (wasRe: Lambda: the Ultimate Design Flaw

[Aahz]

In article <Vrv3e.133894$dP1.471335 at newsc.telia.net>,
Sunnan  <sunnan at handgranat.org> wrote:
>>> [Aahz]
>>>> 
>>>>"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
>>>>classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code --
>>>>not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death."  --GvR
>
>It's just that I'm having a hard time matching that quote to what I 
>though python was about. I thought boring code was considered a virtue 
>in python. ("Explicit is better than implicit", "sparse is better than 
>dense".)
>
>Because what is "boring"? The opposite of dense, tense, intense. Utterly 
>predictable; it's like the combination of all my prejudices. Even before 
>I knew, I thought "Bet Python separates statements from expressions".

Note very, VERY, *VERY* carefully that the quote says nothing about
"boring code".  The quote explicitly refers to "reams of trivial code"
as boring -- and that's quite true.  Consider this distinction:

    if foo == 'red':
        print 'foo is red'
    elif foo == 'blue':
        print 'foo is blue'

versus

    print "foo is", foo

I'm sure you can think of many other examples -- real examples -- if you
put your mind to work; Guido's point is about the essential necessity of
refactoring and rewriting code for conciseness and clarity.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- 
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death."  --GvR