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

[Ville Vainio]

>>>>> "Sunnan" == Sunnan  <sunnan at handgranat.org> writes:

    Sunnan> Ville Vainio wrote:

    Sunnan> Also, Guido recently urged people to explicitly write
    Sunnan> recursions rather than to use reduce - which I thought was
    Sunnan> completely in line with what I've seen as python's goals:
    Sunnan> readability/understandability as more important than
    Sunnan> terseness/non-boringness.

The problem w/ reduce is that it's not intuitive. You'll have to stop
to think what the code w/ reduce does - effectively converting it to a
normal loop (not recursion!) in your head. It's a net loss when you
compare it to just reading an explicit loop as written in code.

    Sunnan> Yesterday, I read some marketing prop describing a
    Sunnan> proprietary IDE (don't remember what language) as
    Sunnan> "exciting", and I went "Ugh, no thanks! Give me calm
    Sunnan> computing." And then I thought - wait: I just ranted about
    Sunnan> boringness on comp.lang.python. Can't boring and calm
    Sunnan> sometimes mean the same thing?

Not for me at least. 'Boring' implies a certain sense of frustration,
not getting anywhere and generally feeling like you are wasting your
time. Human attention is a limited resource, and being bored leads to
loss of attention.

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb