On 2018-05-07 09:17, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
I'm arguing that for some people, your preferred syntax*is* more
distracting and hard to comprehend than the more self-descriptive
version with named functions. And its not just a matter of*learning*
the API, it is a matter of using it so often that it ceases to look
weird and looks natural.[1]
<snip>
But if you think it isn't distracting, I think you are mistaken, and I
think we ought to show caution in making it a built-in or an offical
part of the module API.
As an aside, this has some parallels with the recent thread about
"objectively quantifying readability". Saying things like "you are
mistaken" implies that there is an objective ground truth about what is
distracting and what is not. And personally I agree that there is such
an objective ground truth, and that it is based on facts about human
pyschology (although I don't think I agree with you about this
particular case). Of course, there may be differences in how
individuals react to things, but there is a real sense in which
different syntaxes, constructs, etc., have something like a "mean level
of confusion" which represents how easy to deal with people in general
find them on average, and by which they can be meaningfully compared.
I'm not sure how to proceed to uncover this (unless the PSF starts
funding psychological experiments!), but I do think it would be good if
we could find ways to get at something like hard evidence for claims
about whether things "really are" distracting, readable, unreadable,
intuitive, etc.
--
Brendan Barnwell
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no
path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown
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