How clean/elegant is Python's syntax?

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:51 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I do agree with that argument. But there's more to picking
argument order than simply "sort by predicted length" :) I'm not
saying it's *wrong* to put sep first, just that it's not as
clearly-and-obviously-the-one-right-way as you suggested.

ChrisA