[Python-ideas] Start argument for itertools.accumulate() [Was: Proposal: A Reduce-Map Comprehension and a "last" builtin]

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 11:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <
turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

> Tim Peters writes:
>
>  > "Sum reduction" and "running-sum accumulation" are primitives in
>  > many peoples' brains.
>
> I wonder what Kahneman would say about that.  He goes to some length
> to explain that people are quite good (as human abilities go) at
> perceiving averages over sets but terrible at summing the same.  Maybe
> they substitute the abstraction of summation for the ability to
> perform the operation?
>

[OT] How is that human ability tested? I am a visual learner and I would
propose that if you have a set of numbers, you can graph it in different
ways to make it easier to perceive one or the other (or maybe both):

- to emphasize the average, draw a line graph -- in my mind I draw a line
through the average (getting the trend for free)
- to emphasize the sum, draw a histogram -- in my mind I add up the sizes
of the bars

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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