Perhaps I am just dumb

Joshua Macy l0819m0v0smfm001 at
Sun Feb 10 02:42:33 CET 2002

wooks wrote:

>>One of the basic philosophies of Python design is that it is wrong for 
>>the language to guess when presented with something that's ambiguous. 
> Which seems to be the opposite of the Perl philosophy - we will try to
> do the right thing.
>>That something is "automagical" is usually a swear word in Python.  This 
>>can make Python seem hairier than other languages which cheerfully take 
>>a stab at what the designers think you may have wanted, but the Python 
>>belief is that those languages are leading you down the garden path, and 
>>sooner rather than later you'll be bitten by the subtlety that the other 
>>language tried to gloss over.
> Hmmm. The good thing about the Perl approch is that (if you read the
> right resource) you get an explanation of the process via it tries to
> do the right thing, which is very effective at getting the conceptual
> message across.

   Yeah, I came to Python from Perl, too, and I used to think that all 
that context sensitivity was the cat's pyjamas--but after the second 
two-day debugging session caused by Perl guessing wrong (or my guessing 
wrong about what Perl would guess), I wasn't so thrilled.  I actually 
tried Python because I bought the O'Reilly book on Advanced Perl 
Programming, and in the author's intro he said really nice things about 
Python.  I went out and looked at Python online, then bought Programming 
Python, and never looked back.  The Perl book is still sitting unread on 
my shelf....

> I was very specific. Is there a forum for the dumber less demanding
> Python user? I got answers that I consider helpful. Thanks to you and
> Sheila.

   Well, glad to be of help.


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