[Python-Dev] PEP 572: Assignment Expressions (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Apr 21 12:45:31 EDT 2018

Chris Angelico writes:

There's that word "readability" again. Sometimes I wish the Zen of Python didn't use it, because everyone seems to think that "readable" means "code I like".

Hey, man, that hurts. Some of us not only have precise statements of the aspects of readability we invoked, but we provided them in our posts.

I sympathize that you get tired of the repetitions of various claims about readability, as well as the proliferation of purely subjective claims about it, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be dismissed this way.

That said, subjectivity is a real problem, and it's not a PEP protagonist's responsibility to deal with it. I would like to recommend that posters who want to make claims about "readability" remember that it's one aspect of Pythonic language design out of many, and that it is a complex concept itself. A claim about readability is a claim about an aspect of the value of a construct, but the word "readability" alone is too subjective to explain why it has (or lacks) that value.

If you can't describe, let alone define, what you mean by "readable", but still feel strongly enough to post, think whether you really mean that word. If so, apologize for that lack, because PEP protagonists have no obligation to figure out what you can't. If not, find another word to express the feeling. Or postpone posting until you have a description or better word.

Language design has a lot of these words involving complexity and subjectivity: readability, expressiveness, power. Remember that your "vote" counts even when subjective: you don't have to justify your likes. But if it's personal, you can express that succinctly with +1/-1. If you want to claim that the subjective feeling is common to many users of Python, you need to communicate it. Try to define the aspect you're using. Do so explicitly, unless the definition you're using was given already in a recent post and is current in the thread.

Steve

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