Programming newbie coming from Ruby: a few Python questions

[Delaney, Timothy (Tim)]

Edmond Dantes wrote:

> Of course, it's all what you really mean by "clever". To me, being
> "clever" partly means writing code without bugs in the first place,
> so there is nothing that needs debugging!!!!!!!!

"Clever" in this context generally means using a trick/hack that is
non-obvious (often even after you understand it). "Cleverness" often
leads to difficult-to-understand code, which is contrary to the "python
philosophy".

There are occasionally times when cleverness is useful, but in those
cases it should always be commented explaining exactly what it is doing,
and why a non-clever solution was not used. Most of the time there's
still a better non-clever way to do it, but the coder is not clever
enough to find it ;)

Tim Delaney