Python slang

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 6 Aug 2016 10:13 am, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 9:21 AM, Marco Sulla
> <mail.python.org at marco.sulla.e4ward.com> wrote:
>> I want to clarify that when I say "different from the other
>> languages", I mean "different from the most used languages", that in
>> my mind are C/C++, C#, Java, PHP and Javascript, mainly.
>>
> 
> Ah, well, that's because those are all one family of languages. If
> instead you were familiar with four LISPy languages, you'd have a
> completely different set of expectations.

Furthermore, that's only six languages out of, what, a couple of thousand
known programming languages?

And even languages clearly in the C family, like Objective-C, D, Swift, Java
and Go, can end up using quite different syntax and execution models.

It amuses me when people know a handful of languages, all clearly derived
from each other, and think that's "most" languages. That's like somebody
who knows Dutch, Afrikaans and German[1] being surprised that Russian,
Cantonese, Hebrew and Vietnamese don't follow the same language rules
as "most languages".



>> I agree it's not hard to understand that `str` is the string type and
>> `len()` is the function that gives you the length, even if you don't
>> know Python (and it's shorter to type...) But it's hard to remember,
>> in particular if you code also in other languages. When I come back to
>> Python, I always ends to write  `somelist.length` instead of
>> `len(somelist)`, some arcane words come out my mouth and a little
>> fairy dies.

The obvious solution to that is that those other languages should replace
their various list.length, collection.size, group.len, etc methods with a
single function, like Python does.

Why Python uses a len() function rather than a length/size/len/whatever
method:

http://effbot.org/pyfaq/why-does-python-use-methods-for-some-functionality-e-g-list-index-but-functions-for-other-e-g-len-list.htm







[1] Low German, of course, not High German, the same branch of German which
lead to Anglo-Saxon and hence to English.



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.