I first looked at Python around 1997, for reasons lost to my ever failing memory, but already being a rather big perl-head by then, I didn't go much past the "Hrm, neat" stage.
I've since decided to give it a real go and am studying a bit from online sources. On one hand there are aspects I really like (large extensive library, big support, stable; and even some aspects of the Python "way", since sometimes, but not always, TMTOWTDI is a PITA.
There is one aspect though that just really clashes with me; the community is VERY quick to point out how you're wrong. It doesn't matter about what, it's just you're wrong. I've found that most of the time, I am, but there's this absoluteist tone that I sense that makes me completely understand why the community has the "Pythonista" term applied.
For example, if you want to join a list with a delimeter, the way to do that is like so: string_delimeter.join(<list, tuple, etc.>) # i.e. ", ".join([1, 3, 4, 7, 10])
Ok, that's just a bit backwards from what I'm used to. I want to join THE LIST with the delimeter. It's a small cognitive dissonance, but it's there. When looking at the FAQ about this, it says ... I'm wrong. No, that's not what I want to do. The exact quote is:
The second objection is typically cast as: “I am really telling a sequence to join its members together with a string constant”. Sadly, you aren’t.
Well, yes, yes I am. Like I said, a small nit, but it could have been phrased in less absolutist verbiage, (and the counter example of "split" is inconsistent with what it's saying, but I digress). Ok, so I get past that. (And there is another less odd looking, but less "OOish" way of doing that if I find I can't stand it. So Python ISN'T just 1 way to do it for everything after all!)
So, playing around, I wonder what happens when I try to join a list, err, sorry, "telling my delimeter to iterate my list and insert itself" (rolls eyes), when it contains the equavalent of a null, namely Python's "None".
", ".join(['a', None, 'b']) # => a,,b?
Nope. Exception. Ok, I can accept that None has no default conversion to a string, and I can accept that there's no easy way to do it (Is there? If there is, IRC folk didn't know, and told me I was wrong for even deigning to ask), but I find this behavior a bit irritating. What was the result when I mentioned this? Not that I'm expecting the wrong thing (I am), or even that I was quick to jump the gun to find this irritating (I was), but rather, I don't find it irritating. Excuse me? I'm pretty sure that I do. "Nope, you don't."
Then there's the PEP standard that calls for no more than 80 character lines. I've been programming professionally awhile, and 132 was all the rage almost 30 years ago. There does seem to be some debate about this, and going over my latest java project my line length averages 37 chars (over some 100k lines of code) so I doubt this would really affect me in any meaningful way, and too, I doubt I'm going to be putting any code into Python's already outstanding standard library, but the discussion around it was just what I've come to find out as typical.
I happened to come into IRC when this debate was going on, and although it was mostly good natured, one of the reasons for 80 is that anything over 80 is unreadable. Not, "*I* find it hard to read over 80 character lines.", or even "GUIDO hates it", but >80 is just absolutely unreadable, for anyone. Questioning that, or even mentioning that YOU can do fine with 132, 150, 180, 250 character lines just about has you burned at the stake since you obviously do not, and cannot float like a small stone.
Lastly, and this is probably confirmation bias, but whenever I come across a blog post comparing, contrasting, teaching, explaining, or anything with a programming language, there is almost inevitably the "Why don't you try it in Python?", "X sucks, you should do this in Python", "Python does this all better, see?" set of bleats and whines. It is the same tenor as the nice young men in their white shirts and black ties coming to my door trying to push their version of God on me. Actually, now that I write that I DO realize that what I'm feeling with some of this community has strong similarities to fundamentalist religious methods of conversion. Hrm, interesting.
So, I'll continue learning as I do find the language very interesting, although I haven't really found it to do things in any sort of way other languages cannot with as much or more expressiveness.
