The Zen of Python
As an unashamed advocate of Python, I thought I would share my interpretation of some of these popular aphorisms as a series of blog posts. They were originaly written by Tim Peters in 1999, which was also about the time I first encoutered Python. Not all of them have been relevant to my work but some certainly act as great reminders of how to approach a programming challenge. These are not direct quotes of the original, nor are they likely to be what Tim had in mind, but they are my interpretation of those ideas, and why Python is my first choice when looking for programming solutions.
These are my top three and others may well follow:
- Complex is better than complicated. Certainly not the original intention, but being an electrical engineer having complex numbers and arithmetic built in is a definite plus. This was in fact what first attracted me to python
- Readability counts. When you go back to your work months later, it certainly helps if you can re-read it and understand what it is all about
- Explicit is better than implicit. When you need to use the code from others such as libraries, code snippets etc; easily figuring out all the dependancies is a great help.