Thank you for commenting on that.
I should indeed have said “idiosyncrasies” instead of “fads” and maybe “quite a few” rather than “lots”. What I was trying to express that in my observation some choices in the course seem to prefer terseness over concepts like explicit over implicit or sparse over dense and thus does not necessarily seem exemplary on the way to become a good Python coder as the question was put.
In the end it is your choice to disregard the things people generally to see as enhancing clarity in Python code. That is cool for you to do, but I view it as distracting form the value from the course.



 jphoward:

That couldn’t be more wrong. The coding approach is built on far more years of research than Python has existed. The basic ideas go back to APL, developed in the late 1950’s.


Part of what strikes me as a weakness of the course that in between valuable takeaways there are passages similar to the above – it almost looks like a strong argument for your coding approach until one asks oneself what exactly (I paraphrase) “our coding approach is based on research that in part predates Python” actually says about the superiority of your coding approach over a more pythonic one.



 jphoward:


Starting with the outright bizarre “Python is 1000 times too slow” claim in the first lecture 2019

This is nearly universally accepted as being true.


The timing presented measured roughly “slowness of Python + slowness of creating lots of Tensors (relatively complex objects) in the hot loop” and it seems bizarre to conclude “Python is thousands of times too slow” in the context of a lecture emphasizing performance measurement as much as it did. Part of the disappointment might be that more controlled experimentation would have been quite easy to have. So in between other things, there is this bit presented with lots of emphasis that looks almost right but is, in reality, quite off.
So again, I do recommend the course, but the frequency of things like the above seems higher than in, to pick a random example, Chris Manning’s cs224n course.
Best regards
Thomas