[Python-ideas] Documenting Python warts (original) (raw)

alex23 wuwei23 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 2 01:54:34 CET 2013

On Jan 2, 10:01 am, Oleg Broytman <p... at phdru.name> wrote:

Paraphrasing Alan Cooper from "The Inmates are Running the Asylum": The phrase "experienced Python programmer" really means the person has been hurt so many times that the scar tissue is thick enough so he no longer feels the pain.

To me, that's nonsense. The pain people are experiencing with "warts" like mutable defaults is entirely from trying to force Python to fit mental models they've constructed of other languages.

The "internal sense" of mutable defaults is that everything is an object, and that functions arguments are declared at definition and not run-time. What you call "implementation artifact" I see as expected behaviour; any other implementation that didn't provide this wouldn't be Python in a number of fundamental ways.

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