One liners

[Dan Stromberg]

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/06/2013 04:54 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> > Does anyone else feel like Python is being dragged too far in the
> direction
> > of long, complex, multiline one-liners?  Or avoiding temporary variables
> > with descriptive names?  Or using regex's for everything under the sun?
> >
> > What happened to using classes?  What happened to the beautiful emphasis
> on
> > readability?  What happened to debuggability (which is always harder than
> > writing things in the first place)?  And what happened to string methods?
> >
> > I'm pleased to see Python getting more popular, but it feels like a lot
> of
> > newcomers are trying their best to turn Python into Perl or something,
> > culturally speaking.
>
> I have not seen any evidence that this trend of yours is widespread.
> The Python code I come across seems pretty normal to me.  Expressive and
> readable.  Haven't seen any attempt to turn Python into Perl or that
> sort of thing.  And I don't see that culture expressed on the list.
> Maybe I'm just blind...


I'm thinking mostly of stackoverflow, but here's an example I ran into (a
lot of) on a job:

somevar = some_complicated_thing(somevar) if
some_other_complicated_thing(somevar) else somevar

Would it really be so bad to just use an if statement?  Why are we
assigning somevar to itself?  This sort of thing was strewn across 3 or 4
physical lines at a time.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20131206/315ce79a/attachment.html>