Are "pythonic" questions opinion-based? [closed]

Question

To an extent greater than some other languages, Python developers focus on the pythonic way:

Python has a particularly strong idiom built around the idea that, "there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it".

Here are some recent, well-received questions that illustrate the issue. If these appeared in other language tags, I suspect that they would be quickly closed.

• This works, but is there some reason I shouldn't do it? Is it pythonic? Is there a better way to do it?
• Is there a pythonic way (without loops) to get a new list where each element is repeated N times?

Requests for "the best way" are necessarily opinion-based, but since the topic is a core feature of the language, do such requests fall in the "Good Subjective" category or should they be closed as "primarily opinion-based?" Is there a known metric to determine the pythonicity of code beyond community consensus?

Answer 1

A little troubling, that the first question could be considered too basic/trivial if it weren't for the words Pythonic - "What is the best way to parse a string that has a number and other characters to an int?"

And perhaps, that is the best litmus test - is it still a good and interesting question without the Pythonic criteria? Because really, all it should imply is simplicity and clarity (etcetera).

A secondary criteria could be the requested outcome (shortest running time, fewer characters, cleaner syntax), which would at least help point out those that are just playing code golf, or asking for code review.

That said, I have a ton of sympathy for people trying to keep their code clean and useful, and I do believe that some well-defined instances should fall under the domain of Stack Overflow (i.e. is there already a function that does this).

Answer 2

As usual, the answer is "is it a good question anyway?"

• The first example you gave I voted to close as off topic:

  Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and the expected results.

• The second is a little disorganized but a good question. The OP had some intuition there was a better way to do it and asked if there was, after documenting what she tried.

• Third question is also off topic for same reason as first.

You're getting at a harder question of "Is it okay for someone to ask a better way to do something, even if they have a working way?" to which the answer is, generally, yes. But the examples you gave don't quite raise this question - they were either very bad questions or decent questions without even having to get into this new debate.

Answer 3

Yes, unfortunately. I have a hard time finding anything that ends with 'ic' to be an objective topic. Because whether or not a qualitative characteristic belongs to a certain class is a question without a 'right' answer necessarily.