On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 3:33 AM, Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Most people's short-term memory is good enough to remember > that "m" refers to the match object while they read the > next couple of lines. IMO, using a longer name would serve > no purpose and would just clutter things up. Indeed. A thought just occurred to me. Maybe we need to instigate a cultural shift where people think about style guides as less dictated by hard-coded rules that were "passed down from the mountain" and more as derived from research that we can all understand about usability. A lot more is known about how human perception and various types of memory and learning work than it was when the "7 things plus/minus 2" rule was invented ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two). It would be fascinating to imagine a future where language designers could talk about such topic with as much confidence as they talk about the efficiency of hash tables. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
