Maybe other languages have this as well, I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever really been told that I wasn’t doing something the PHP way, the Javascript way, the C way, the Perl way or the Bash shell way. However, I’ve seen references to some of my opensource projects, critical of them for not being 100% pythonic. Recently I saw a post in the Tornado group, saying its’ use of libcurl is not pythonic.

If being pythonic means reinventing the wheel, in python, I’m pretty confident I’m going to stick with the opinion I’m not going to worry about being pythonic. I’ll worry about commenting and documenting what I do in order for other developers to follow behind me. I’ll worry about getting the job done in the least amount of time using the least amount of physical resources (cpu, memory, io) as possible.

I think I now have one of those first questions for when I interview developers for my business, when I get to that point. “How much focus do you put on making your python, pythonic?” I bet I won’t be looking for the answer some Python developers are expecting I am.

I wonder how pythonic a lot of 2.x code is going to be when/if Python 3 ever becomes the preferred development branch anyway.

py·thon·ic (pī-thŏn’ĭk)
adj.
Of, relating to, or resembling a python.
Of or resembling an oracle; prophetic.
Of extraordinary size and power.
Of code designed in a specific way preferred by Python developers
Of making Joe roll his eyes as he gets work done

Yes the title of this blog post changed, here’s a video detailing why. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=0m56s