[Python-Dev] [slighly OT] Native speakers and hurting brains (original) (raw)

Boris Borcic bborcic at gmail.com
Fri Jul 7 19:02:52 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 7/5/06, Michael Chermside <mcherm at mcherm.com> wrote:

Guido writes: [discussion of how to fix the can't-bind-outer-scope-vars wart] ... Are there any other native speakers who side with Michael?

A bit OT, but why should native speakers (eg of English) have special authority ? I mean this neither as an attack on native speakers nor as a rethorical question.

I recently re-read the "sum()" discussion to figure out how it came about that sum() half bails out on sequences_of_sequences (by requiring me to specify the start value) except when the nested sequences are strings, in which cases it 90% bails out : by first asking for an adequate start value, and then - once I've provided it - telling me it understands my intent but that I should use ''.join instead. Is this a programming language shell or a text-based adventure game ? <0.8 wink>

AFAICT, the cause of this funny strangeness is that a very respected member of pydev and native speaker of English with an truly unique sense of humor, found early in the discussion that sum(sequence_of_strings) "made his brain hurt"; and while this person is the very opposite of a newbie, his judgment was combined with concerns relating to newbies to result in the current behavior.

I believe that in this case native linguistic intuition made the decision... and that a non-native intuition should have reversed it by noting in due time that the cognitive dissonance that native speakers could find to sum(seq_of_str), isn't in fact distinct from the cognitive dissonance that any newbie should find to the use of the + operator to concatenate strings or sequences rather than summing numbers.

To restate, as a non-native speaker, and inasmuch "it hurts the brain" is the real reason against sum(seq_of_str) calling ''.join(seq_of_str) directly, I believe this is a case of excess authority being given to native linguistic intuition (of english speaking python experts) with the result of /adding/ to the cognitive dissonance of using + to concatenate strings (for all programming newbies).

Best regards to all,

Boris Borcic

"On naît tous les mètres du même monde"

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