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Comment by tragomaskhalos | Hacker News Reader

Moving to Python from Ruby, one very early scarring experience was battling trying to get the length of a string, before eventually discovering len() - a free function, whereas in Ruby (OO purist that it is), everything is a method.

Well I thought this was rather silly and counterintuitive of Python, and said so in some forum or other, whereupon i discovered the very passionate views of folks who have come down hard on one side or other of this debate.

So, lesson learned: keep one's opinions on such matters to oneself, as one man's banquet is another's poison. In which vein, it would be splendid if this comment did not occasion another screed about the manifest glories of __len__ to enlighten us heathens.

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> was battling trying to get the length of a string

This makes it sound like you where trying to learn the language by typing in random stuff and just hoping something runs.

Yes every language will leave you scared if your path to learning it doesn’t even involve reading a single page about its most basic functioning.

What an extraordinarily patronising response !

Firstly, not 'scared', 'scarred' - merely a bit of harmless hyperbole to indicate a briefly frustrating situation.

Secondly, this is not monkeys-at-typewriters, merely an expectation that Python would conform to any other object-based language and have a public method on string to report its length. This should be a discoverable, not an RTFM case.

While I agree with you the grandparent was unnecessarily patronizing, they do have a point. “Built-in functions” is the first chapter of the documentation following the introduction, there’s no way to miss it. If you don’t even skim the introductory documentation, I’m not exactly sure what you expect to happen. Python is not Ruby nor is it Java, and it predates both. Why would it follow the idioms of those languages?

It does have a public method, __len__(). It’s a protocol method that’s more discoverable than size/length/len/count or whatever other ad-hoc name.

Yes I'm aware, and yes it's 'public' in the sense that all Python methods are but my point was that it is not meant to be called directly. The whole argument as to whether or not this is a superior mechanism was exactly the cause of heated debate the first time around and something I was keen to avoid here!

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