Why Python is Important for You

I work with python daily. I find that when I first started I avoid a lot of the "fancy" constructs such as list comprehensions, dynamic arguments, and decorators as well as meta programming.

The great thing is the bar to being effective in the language is so low. You can pretty much pick up most python code and just read it and get a general feel for what it does. Not only that but it is much easier to read because of whitespace delimiting.

I can generally tell the quality of a python program but how nicely indented it is. If there are lots of indents like 5 or 6 levels deep I know something is wrong. For a newbie if your code is hard to understand and it is in Python you are writing it wrong.

It's important because it reminds me I should keep looking.

I should keep looking instead of turning it into my Blub. I love Python but its boundaries have been hitting me frequently for years. There probably never will be a total sweet spot between functionality, syntax, compatibility, support, and platform-crossing but I know I have to keep looking for a language that's more sophisticated yet more practical.

I want to make what I think is an important qualification which conflicts with a reading of your comment: Python is readable to people who are familiar with conventional Algol-based programming, i.e. every modern programmer. That does not make it readable to an arbitrary English-speaker, which is an assertion I sometimes hear: "Oh, Python is so much like English, people who aren't even programmers can read some of it!" Which I can say from experience is not the case in the slightest. If it were, my job—which involves teaching Python to non-programmers—would be inestimably easier.

Python is simple and easy because it takes everything you know from other languages and systems and makes those things simple and easy and pleasant to do. I've even seen Python used as a kind of runnable pseudocode for projects that would eventually be written in other object-oriented Algol-based imperative languages, which is a testament to how well it distills those concepts down and makes programming simple. But it is not "readable in English." It is readable in pseudo-Algol.

I find a great way to avoid deep nesting is to move code to functions, and bail out when some conditions are not met.

As an example, this deeply nested code:

    def frob(someargs):
        if something > 2:
            ... # do some processing
            if that == "CONNECT":
                ... # some more processing
                if verdict in blessedsolutions:
                    ... # even more processing
                    print "Happy birthday!"

I tend to write like this:

    def frob(someargs):
        if something 

I do the same thing in loops, using 'continue'. The above second example looks rather flat, but in practice the 'do some processing' statements often need identations due to conditions and loops.

I added the processing to demonstrate that it's not always possible to combine conditions. And, of course this way of 'bailing out early' vs. 'nested ifs and processing' is not Python specific. The dogma that a function should have only one exit point (as proposed by 'structured programming' adepts and Pascal afficionados) often leads to deeply nested control structures and convoluted testing. Brian Kernighan has written a paper on this[1].

[1] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.htm...