[Andrew Barnert <abarn...@yahoo.com>]
> ...
> I think you’re arguing that the philosophy of itertools is just wrong, at
> least for
> the kind of code you usually write with it and the kind of people who usually
> write that code. Is that fair, or am I misrepresenting you here?
It's fair enough, although rather than "wrong" I'd say more that it's
inappropriately applying design principles that work well in most of
Python's libraries to an area where they don't. The very fact that
half the itertools docs are devoted to "recipes" kinda suggests it
knows it's leaving its intended audience hanging ;-)
It's hardly coincidence that the more-itertools and itertoolz packages
are richer, in very similar ways, than Python's version. The primary
itertoolz author does a nice job of explaining that project's heritage
starting here:
https://toolz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/heritage.html
> Meanwhile, I think Guido and some others accept the itertools philosophy
Don't know about Guido, but certainly applies to Raymond. Guido is
more a practicality-beats-purity guy. but has no natural attraction to
functional languages (Raymond partly does, with his APL background).
Guido just sees a function here that would be nice to have.
I do like functional languages, and always have, so it seems to fall
on me here to advocate for what those weirdos value. In part, no, the
itertools namespace is not a precious resource that must be vigilantly
minimized ;-)
> but argue that first needs to be there because many of the kinds of people who
> need it actually can’t just write it themselves (they don’t know about 2-arg
> next,
> or they don’t understand the subtleties of leaking StopIteration, or
> whatever).
> That’s a pretty different argument. (Not that there can’t be something to both
> arguments, of course.)
And I expect Raymond would say `first()` isn't needed at all - if it
has to be addressed, make it recipe #30.
There's something to that argument too.
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