Another try at Python's selfishness

[Terry Hancock]

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:27:55 -0600
DH <no at spam.com> wrote:
> But I think most people who don't like the extraneous
> 'self' in python  just consider it a minor inconvenience
> and don't even notice it after  using python for a while. 

After messing around with Javascript (many magical
variables that suddenly show up in your namespaces!), I
began to *seriously* appreciate Python's design.  Having
self as an explicit parameter is beautiful self-documenting
design.

The convention that the self parameter is always "self" with
4 characters instead of, say, __ or _ or s can get annoying,
but of course, you are actually free to break this
convention.  The advantage to keeping it, of course, is that
anybody can google "python self" and immediately get an
explanation of what it is, whereas googling for "python _"
is less likely to be helpful.

In fact, I think this ease of finding documentation is one
of the reasons why Python's heavy use of keywords (rather
than symbolic operators) is so useful. Recent additions like
"list comprehensions" and "generators" create a lot of
newbie confusion not least because newbies simply don't know
that [x for x in mylist] is *called* a "list comprehension"
(if they knew what it was called, they'd answer the question
for themselves).

They see the code and don't have any idea what it is. It
adds to the basic or core knowledge that you have to wade
through before you can say you "know Python" even at the
trivial level.

One of the things that attracted me to Python (at v1.5.2)
was the fact that the core language was so small and simple
that I could learn it in just a few days. The more
syntactical sugar added, the less that will be true, though.

I don't think we've busted the system yet, but I think
there's some reason for caution against making things any
*more* complicated. I still see "newbie-friendliness" as a
MAJOR plus for Python -- it increases the chance that users
of your software will become contributors.

I mean, even Perl was probably pretty simple in the
beginning. ;-)

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com