Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[RainyDay]

On May 26, 5:33 pm, Daniel Kluev <dan.kl... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 3:10 AM, Octavian Rasnita <orasn... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Once again. Suppose we have array of key-value pairs (two-dimensional
> >> array),
>
> > This is a forced example to fit the way Python can do it with a clean syntax, but I don't think there are cases in which somebody wants to create hashes/dictionaries where the key is not a plain string but an array.
>
> > This is not a rare case, but a case that probably nobody needs, ever.
>
> This is far more popular case than converting flat lists into dicts in
> Python world. In fact, I *never* had need to convert flat list instead
> of properly structured one. Thats why we have both lists and tuples,
> after all.

I agree that it's almost never needed to convert flat
lists. I've used python for over 10 years and I remember
exactly one time when I needed to do that. It turned out
that it's a bit tricky and hacky to do in python, in
the sense that it's hard to remember if I'll ever need
it again, but it will only take minutes to google it.

For example, in one piece of code I did recently I
created a dict of range tuples and counts from a sequential list, like
so:

ranges = [(x*width, (x+1)*width) for x in range(y)]
data = dict((x,0) for x in ranges)

A perl programmer would instead create a flat list
and then convert it to dict. And if he were new to
python he'd create a flat list and then be annoyed
that there's no quick and easy way to make it into
a dict.

Python way in this case is more structured and
disciplined, and the only "flaw" I can see is that
it doesn't meet expectations of perl programmers.

 -Rainy