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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

That honestly looks more like a failure on the part of the Python library maintainer to create a pleasant way to create record prototypes.

I mean, all you're doing in your list example is creating dictionary and list examples of the mapping you want. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that in Python.

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  creators = [{"name"   :{"name_authority"    :TextField,
                          "name_authority_id" :IntegerField,
                          "display_string"    :TextField},
              "user_id" :IntegerField,
              "roles"   :[TextField],
              "attrs"   :[TextField],
              "xts"     :[TextField]}]

Yes you could do something like this. But the lack of keywords does reintroduces some noise via the quotes around strings. Moving the colons around like this to give visual alignment would probably be frowned upon. So my sense is that this would be considered "un-Pythonic" but I could be wrong.

Use single quotes; less noise.

who writes code like that?

    creators = [
        {
            "name": {
                "name_authority": TextField,
                "name_authority_id": IntegerField,
                "display_string": TextField
            },
            "user_id" :IntegerField,
            "roles": [TextField],
            "attrs": [TextField],
            "xts": [TextField]
        }
    ]

anyway

I certainly don't write Python code that looks like what I wrote. My point was that the various idiomatic versions, including yours, certainly isn't any more readable than the Clojure version.

I don't speak for everyone but the reason I see lisp code as unreadable is that most of what I've seen is written like your example. That is, there is some indentation which helps, but it's as-if the coder is afraid to utilise vertical space so they put all the closing brackets on the same line, most of the opening ones in the middle of some lines. With that kind of formatting (for me at-least), it's not immediately clear which.

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