On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM, John Ladasky <lada...@my-deja.com> wrote: > What I would say is that, when PROGRAMMERS look at Python code for the > first time, they will understand what it does more readily than they > would understand other unfamiliar programming languages. That has > value.
This is something that's never truly defined. Everyone talks of how this language or that language is readable, but if you mean that you can look at a line of code and know what *that line* does, then Python suffers badly and assembly language wins out; but if you mean that you should be able to glance over an entire function and comprehend its algorithm, then I have yet to see any language in which it's not plainly easy to write bad code. Even with good code, anything more than trivial can't be eyeballed in that way - if you could, what would docstrings be for? Really, the metric MUST be Python programmers. Intuitiveness is of value, but readability among experienced programmers is far more useful. If I write a whole lot of code today, and next year I'm dead and someone else has replaced me, I frankly don't mind if he has to learn the language before he can grok my code. I _do_ mind if, even after he's learned the language, he can't figure out what my code's doing; and that's where Python's placed itself at about the right level - not so high that it's all in airy-fairy conceptual work, but not so low that it gets bogged down. There's a handful of other languages that are similarly placed, and they're the languages that I would call "readable". Here's an analogy: One statement (aka line of code, etc) corresponds to one sentence in English. Massive one-liners are like some of the sentences in Paul's epistles; assembly language is like "The cat sat on the mat". Both are valid; both are hard to read. There, have fun tearing thaat to shreds :) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
