Comment by abenga

Those both seem a little bit more consistent than the Ruby example, however. To understand the JS example for example, you only need know that to call a method on an object, you do `object.method(arguments)`, and this is chained in a straightforward manner, with methods called on the returned values left to right. Ditto for the Haskell example. Maybe the Ruby one does the same thing, but even in this extremely simple example, we still have two different ways of doing the same thing.

For Python, you don't really have to use list comprehensions in the place of multiple for loops, you can sacrifice the brevity afforded to write the same thing in a more easily understandable fashion.

> ... confusing as hell to "newcomers". For example, when a list comprehension has multiple `for`s, what order are they nested in?

I get that this is just a rhetorical question to make a point about newcomers, and I do agree it's not immediately obvious, but for the record: you can imagine any "if"s and "for"s in a list comprehension are nested statements in the same order. So, for example, this:

   l = [
      y.foo()
      for x in my_list
      if x.blah() > 7
      for y in x.ys()
   ]

   l = []
   for x in my_list:
       if x.blah() > 7:
           for y in x.ys():
               l.append(y.foo())

>Python seems to be the odd one out. Imo, its list comprehensions are confusing as hell to "newcomers". For example, when a list comprehension has multiple `for`s, what order are they nested in?

The order is mentioned right in the docs, for Python 3:

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#list-...

>Note how the order of the for and if statements is the same in both these snippets.

And it is mentioned even more clearly in corresponding section in the Python 2 docs - last I checked, years ago,

Update: IOW, the nested list comprehension syntax is confusing only to newcomers or even experienced devs who are lazy or stupid enough to not read the docs for the language feature they want to use, before using it, IOW, "winging it", whether to try to seem cool or due to peer pressure or other reasons, all of which are stupid ones, even in the short term, because the cost is higher than the benefit in most cases.

I don't know much Ruby outside of a few toy examples I wrote a long time ago. For most languages, there would be parentheses around objects you pass to functions, like `.filter({|x| x.odd? })`. This lends some consistency and makes it easy (for me at least) to understand that an anonymous function is passed to `filter`. Just separating it using spaces feels like Bash, something I find difficult to write anything slightly complicated in.

> Ruby has the best syntax with regards to blocks/lambdas/closures.

A bit of Smalltalk shining through Ruby.

> Why are we optimizing a programming language for people who don't know it, instead of optimizing it for people who actually program in it?

Everyone who actually programs in a language was once a person who didn't know it. Languages which optimize for succinct terseness might be powerful once you master them, but they will never enter mainstream use, which I guess is not necessarily the aim.