How clean/elegant is Python's syntax?

[Ian Kelly]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:36 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I don't object to changing the join method (one of the more
>> shoe-horned string methods) back into a function, but to my eyes
>> you've got the arguments backward.  It should be:
>>
>> def join(sep, iterable): return sep.join(iterable)
>
> Trouble is, it makes some sense either way. I often put the larger
> argument first - for instance, I would write 123412341324*5 rather
> than the other way around - and in this instance, it hardly seems as
> clear-cut as you imply. But the function can't be written to take them
> in either order, because strings are iterable too. (And functions that
> take args either way around aren't better than those that make a
> decision.)

The reason I like having the shorter argument first (at least for
function calls) is for when I'm reading the code.  If I'm interested
in the second argument, then to find it I have to scan over the first
argument.  I would rather scan over something short like '\n' than
something longer like a list comprehension.  It sounds like a trivial
thing, but it really does make it easier to find where an expression
starts and ends when the expression is short.