The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions

I dunno why people think functional programming jobs are vanishingly scarce. They are not. If you can demonstrate skill in functional languages, you might even get recruited.<p>It's true there are more wage-slave code-a-day jobs, but those jobs can be easily filled by uninspired hacks who are in it for the money. If you're reading this, the odds of you being one of those hacks is very low. The job market is smaller, but the workforce of talented functional programmers is <i>much</i> smaller, so the demand is still high.<p>And Clojure &#38; Scala are even easier because you can get a java job and them worm them in. It's not difficult to make a compelling argument that Clojure &#38; Scala are better at Java than Java is.

Great article, bad title. Someone with more kharma mind changing it to Python Infrequently answered Questions?

Python infrequently asked questions, google cache at<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:norvig.com/python-iaq.html+http://norvig.com/python-iaq.html" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:norvig....</a><p>Seems a bit out-of-date (upcoming Python 2.5?), not sure why it's here really.

Is there much benefit to<p><pre><code> fact = lambda n: _if (n &#60;= 1) (1) (lambda: n * fact(n-1)) </code></pre> over<p><pre><code> def fact(n): if (n &#60;= 1): return 1 else: return n * fact(n-1) </code></pre> 1 line vs 5 lines doesn't seem like an advantage to me when it takes pretty much the same amount of time to read and understand the complicated 1 liner.<p>Is there more optimisation possible?

Some of the responses are outdated, here's one of the things that is now part of python:<p>Python 2.5 introduced <i>defaultdict</i> in the <i>collections</i> module:<p><pre><code> from collections import defaultdict d = defaultdict(int) d['foo'] +=1 # look ma! no error! </code></pre> For this application, if you're using Python 2.7 there's now a <i>Counter</i> in <i>collections</i>, you can do the same as above, just call Counter(). You can also do:<p><pre><code> c = Counter(iter) # iter is an iterable. It will count the elements!</code></pre>

It's also worth noting that, in Python 2.6 and higher, we DO have a ternary operator:<p><pre><code> x = 3 if foo() else 6</code></pre>

If u cn rd ths... then you may speak Hebrew or Arabic, which are basically written without vowels.

Regarding the "if thr wr any", and the rise of Haskell and Clojure, I wonder whether such caveat applies any longer.<p>As for content of the Python IAQ, I've enjoyed learning about two python idioms I had never known possible:<p>1. The ternary conditional operator:<p>x = &#60;result&#62; if &#60;test&#62; else &#60;alternative&#62;<p>2. Using <i>or</i> to assign an alternative value when the first is False or None<p>x = &#60;option&#62; or &#60;option&#62;