On: Programming languages, operating systems, despair ...

[nailer]

> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done

I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg:

    ','.join(mylist)

Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be:

    list.join(',')

Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

[jemfinch → nailer]

> Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

Even fewer people think of how to do that in the face of heterogeneous and polymorphic lists.

Intuition is not God, it's just an informant. Sometimes it's wrong, no matter the language.

[arethuza → nailer]

I was about to write about how horrible that is when I realized that I do that all the time in jQuery:

$("<div>Foo</div>").appendTo(bar)

[madair → arethuza]

That's not the same, $(...) is a method which creates a list. ',' is a string. So actually you're doing exactly the opposite of the python idiom.

[arethuza → madair]

Possibly, but that div is a literal chunk of HTML so that's arguably closer to a string than the normal jQuery selectors.

[bobbyi → nailer]

It's a convenience so that every iterable object in the world doesn't need to implement a join() method. I pass generator expressions to join as often as lists, so it works out well that the method is on the string rather than the list.

[cabalamat → bobbyi]

> It's a convenience so that every iterable object in the world doesn't need to implement a join() method.

The way to do this would be to have an IterableMixin that implements join() (and a load of other stuff) so long as the subclass implements a small number of basic methods.

[X-Istence → cabalamat]

Sure, but is it up to the programmer to "subclass" or somehow specify that his type implements IterableMixin? Or is it up to the python interpreter to realise that it implements certain functions and automatically do this?

[gcb → nailer]

i like that because it's a string's method returning a string.

[nailer → gcb]

Methods aren't defined by what they return. I have a host method (a property, to be precise) that returns a location of the host. It wouldn't make sense for it to return another host object.

string methods are things you do to strings.

list methods are things you do to list.

Most people think of taking a list, and gluing it with a string, not taking a string, and using it as glue for a list.

[gcb → nailer]

good points. I was pointing out mostly a subjective 'beauty'.

just of note, the architect in me would go for 'why not have both?'