alt Hacker NewsI never really understood what exactly is so readable about python. I've been developing in Python for 8 years now, and before that I was a C# developer, and I don't find Python to be that more readable.
Sure there's less ceremony, and yes, you can have your project going with just a single file, but other than that...?
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I agree, especially very "pythonic" structures if overly shortened are hard to decipher especially if you don't use or read python on a regular basis.
Often times when I am reading a medium or advanced python codebase I need to look into the function definitions and operator documentation to understand what is supposed to be returned. Where with C-like languages I feel it is easier to build that context because there is more context written and less tricky syntactic sugar.
Reaaaally?
I think a lot of the readability of python is in the fact you don't need to be recently familiar with it to pick up what its doing most of the time.
Over my career I've dipped in and out of rust, typescript, perl, swift, etc codebases. I'm no expert in any of these, but every single time I have to look something up to understand what this set of arcane symbols or syntax means.
When I dip into Python I just ... read it.
(None of this is to say I prefer Python, just that I really do get the readable thing)
"whitespace, not brackets" from a sibling comment touches on it, but a lot of people, beginners especially (but not uniquely), are put off by symbols when reading code. Python is less symbol-heavy than most languages, by using whitespace and syntax and words (eg. `and` not `&&`, explicit `lambda x:` rather than `x =>`) in their place. It doesn't go so far as COBOL as to be cumbersome, but far enough to make a difference to a lot of people.
The "other than that" is whitespace, not brackets. Whether that's a big deal is up to you, but the carry on effect of that is that the code is indented the way the control flow interprets it, so there are no bugs from misplaced braces. (Plenty of other bugs for other reasons, unfortunately.)
Other than that? Exactly that!
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C# is also a great language, but notice how it have been moving closer to Pyhon-style syntax. E.g. now you can initialize a list like [a, b, c]. They wouldn’t add that syntax if they didnt think it was an improvement.
Less ceremony and boilerplate means more readable code.