Re:Is there any code in Firefox (as of 2020) that comes from...
by DonHopkins on Saturday March 28, 2020 @01:32AM
(#22709451)
Guido wrote a fascinating article about why Python lambdas are expressions and not functions, so if you want multiple statements, you have to def a function and refer to it by name.
>All Things Pythonic:
Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles.
By Guido van van Rossum, February 10, 2006.
>Summary:
>An incident on python-dev today made me appreciate (again) that there's more to language design than puzzle-solving. A ramble on the nature of Pythonicity, culminating in a comparison of language design to user interface design.
>Guido: Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles
>And there's the rub: there's no way to make a Rube Goldberg language feature appear simple. Features of a programming language, whether syntactic or semantic, are all part of the language's user interface. And a user interface can handle only so much complexity or it becomes unusable.
>The discussion is about multi-statement lambdas, but I don't want to discuss this specific issue. What's more interesting is the discussion of language as a user interface (an interface to what, you might ask), the underlying assumption that languages have character (e.g., Pythonicity), and the integrated view of semantics and syntax of language constructs when thinking about language usability.
https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358
>All Things Pythonic: Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles. By Guido van van Rossum, February 10, 2006.
>Summary:
>An incident on python-dev today made me appreciate (again) that there's more to language design than puzzle-solving. A ramble on the nature of Pythonicity, culminating in a comparison of language design to user interface design.
[...]
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1298
>Guido: Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles
>And there's the rub: there's no way to make a Rube Goldberg language feature appear simple. Features of a programming language, whether syntactic or semantic, are all part of the language's user interface. And a user interface can handle only so much complexity or it becomes unusable.
>The discussion is about multi-statement lambdas, but I don't want to discuss this specific issue. What's more interesting is the discussion of language as a user interface (an interface to what, you might ask), the underlying assumption that languages have character (e.g., Pythonicity), and the integrated view of semantics and syntax of language constructs when thinking about language usability.
[...]