Reading

backwards.txt

I'm a Rubyist with a lot of admiration for Python. Both languages are
similar (in the grand scheme of things) and each has huge pros and cons.

Python does not click for me in the same way as Ruby does not
click for perhaps the majority of programmer-kind. German doesn't click
for me either and 100m+ people speak that ;-) But I recently saw an
example of WHY Python taxes my Ruby brain a little.

I found some code at http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-learning-haskell-python-makes-you-a-worse-programmer/:

  "\n".join(foo.description() for foo in mylist if foo.description() != "")

In order to understand this, I have to read the code in a way that's 
unnatural to me. If I start from the beginning, I'm looking at a new line
character in a string. What am I doing with it? I'm asking it to join
a big expression together. An expression made up of foo.description()s?
Ah, foo is a list that can be enumerated. Oh, and then only include those
if foo.description() is not an empty string. Got it.

The equivalent(ish) Ruby is (and there are many ways to do this):

  mylist.reject { |foo| foo.description.empty? }.map(&:description).join("\n")

It's not as short but we start with the actual subject, the list, rather than
a miscellaneous bit player. So we have our hero, the list, reject any of its
elements whose descriptions are empty, 'convert' that inti a list of all the
associated descriptions, then join them together with newline characters.
It reads from left to right, like (punctuation-heavy) English prose.

There is nothing wrong with Python but the literary part of my brain has
become... spoiled to reading things in a certain order. I should surely
get used to other approaches with practice, but this is explains the
situation in the here and now.

(A key point here isn't that Ruby is absolutely right or wrong. Spoken
languages differ significantly in things like subject, verb, and object order.
Ruby's approach fits more naturally with my current way of thinking and,
I believe, more in line with an English style approach, a la subject.verb(object)

I will concede when I first started out this took my brain for a loop. Its now second nature to me now, I would also argue I am better for it knowing it.