> On Feb 25, 2015, at 12:45 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> http://www.slideshare.net/pydanny/python-worst-practices
> 
> Any that should be added to this list?  Any that be removed as not that bad?

I read ‘em. I thought they were pretty good, some more than others. And I 
learned some things. I especially liked the first one, since I’ve struggled 
with that one a bunch. In the context of “hey, accept Python for what it is”, I 
agree greatly with it. Memorize the builtins, and stay the heck away from them. 
I’ve been burned many times because I stored some bytes in a binding call, er, 
uh, ‘bytes’. And having mentored some people learning Python in the early 
stages, any explanation other than “Thou Shalt Never Use These Holy Words” just 
confuses people.

That said… 

If I were giving a talk at SPLASH (or some other suitable polyglot conference), 
I might do one called “Language Design Worst Practices”.

One of my first slides might be titled:

Abuse Common Tokens in Confusing Ways

* Make your language have a lot of keywords. Enough to make memorizing them ALL 
unlikely, requiring constant visits to your documentation
* Make sure said keywords are many of the obvious words programmers would use 
in their applications (map, object, bytes, dir, etc)
* Design your syntax so that you can’t disambiguate them contextually between 
bind and reference
* Be sure to use it in a late bound language where no warnings will be provided 
about the mistake you’re making at authorship time, deferring the educational 
experience to sundry run times

In my examples column of this bad practice, I’d put Python of course. :)

I do like Python, and I accept it for what it is, so no one needs to jump 
forward as a Holy Python See to convert me to the truth. I also know that with 
most other languages, that first slide wouldn’t need to be one of the prominent 
“worst practices” slide.
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