[movpasd]

In my mind this is a holdover from when Python was much more procedural/C-like and as a Python developer it's one of my pet peeves. (I can't count how many times I've started writing the name of a list, had to backtrack to stick a `len` in front, and then tap tap tap arrow keys to get back to the front.)

I suppose we really ought to blame Euler for introducing the f(x) notation 300 years ago... Very practical when the function is the entity you want to focus on, often less useful in (procedural) programming, where we typically start with the data and think in terms of a series of steps.

Some languages like D and Nim have "UFCS", uniform function call syntax, where all functions can be called as methods on any variable. Basically, it decouples the implicit association between method dispatch and namespacing/scoping semantics. Rust also has something they call UFCS, but it only goes one way (you can desugar methods as normal functions, but you can't ... resugar? arbitrary functions as methods). Python couldn't implement this without breaking a lot of stuff due to its semantics, but it is definitely a feature I'd like to see more of.

[masklinn]

> In my mind this is a holdover from when Python was much more procedural/C-like

That never existed. Or if it did, it was long before any trace exists, and there's trace from quite a way back when e.g. the first commit in which I can find the len() builtin (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/c636014c430620325f8...) also has calls to file.read and list.append, and the first python-level methods are created just a few commits later (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/336f2816cd3599b0347...). Though there may be missing commits, this is 30 in, back when Python was an internal CWI thing (although nearly a year in, according to the official timelines of the early days).

This was years before magic methods were even added (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/04691fc1c1bb737c0db...).

So no, I don't think it's a "holdover from" anything. Rather seems like it's GvR's sensibilities.

[movpasd]

Thanks for the thorough correction. I think I was making that assumption due to the semantics of the language, which suggests classes and methods being somewhat "bolted onto" a dict-based core. Unfortunately for me, it makes me all the more dissatisfied with the choice.

[JimDabell]

You’re correct. In GvR’s own words:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-November/...

[masklinn]

Thanks. I may have already read that post (or I just correctly backtracked the reasoning), as I was pretty much convinced namespacing conflict (the second bit of rationale) was a factor for the dunder-ing of methods, but I had no source so ultimately decided not to put it in.

[crabbone]

> and then tap tap tap arrow keys to get back to the front.)

Learn a better editor, and this will stop being a problem.

[ColonelPhantom]

Or just use any text editor ever and use Ctrl+arrow to jump word-wise. The most common efficiency issue in editing is editor literacy, not editor featureset.

[crabbone]

Good programming editors are designed with the idea that as you master the program, you become more precise in telling it what to do. When editing programs, the author usually applies several navigational schemes to interpret the text of the program: by structure, by syntactical elements, but geography of the screen.

To expand on this: examples of navigating by structure include moving by token / expression / definition. Examples of moving by syntax would be the search or "jedi" navigation (i.e. navigation where you enter a special mode requiring from you to type characters that iteratively refine your search results). Finally, simply moving up / down / left right by certain number of characters is the "screen geography" way.

There's no way to tell which method is better, because they apply better in different situations, however the "screen geography" method usually ends up being the worst, because it's the most labor-intensive and requires from the author to dedicate a lot of attention to achieve precision (i.e. move exactly N spaces to the left and then exactly M spaces down is very easy to get wrong, also, with larger N and M becomes really tedious).

Navigation by word is only slightly better than navigation by character, and often falls into the "screen geography" kind of navigation. It's easy to learn, it's quite universal and doesn't require understanding of the structure of the program or mastering better techniques (eg. "jedi jump"). That's not to say that it should be excluded from the arsenal -- quite the opposite, but a master programmer (in the sense of someone who writes programs masterfully) would be the one who's less reliant on this kind of navigation.

[0x008]

> If your pavement has potholes, just learn to jump over them.

[crabbone]

No. That's a wrong analogy. There's no way around having to navigate the text of the program back and forth, by character, by word, by statement, by definition and so on. This is bread and butter of people who write code.

If you complain about doing this, this is because you don't know how to perform the basic functions necessary to write code. Heuristically, this is because you are either using a bad editor or didn't learn how to use a decent one.

I.e. your complaint is more comparable to Amazon reviews coming from people who don't know how to use the product and then write something asinine, like that one about a loo brush that feels too rough when used in the capacity of toilet paper (though I believe that one was actually a joke inspired by similarly stupid but less funny reviews).