Thanks for the critique. I&#x27;m not sure I added much to that analysis on Stack Overflow outside of headers, a few more opinions, and a little bit more explanation. I mostly wrote to have something to link my students to because this question has come up before and I didn&#x27;t find any of the more comprehensive SO answers to be easily digestible&#x2F;skim-able.<p>The python-ideas thread from last year about using + on dictionaries was also an inspiration. I don&#x27;t recommend reading it in full (there&#x27;s some painful debating) but there were some really interesting concerns brought up on there in regards to this particular problem.<p>In regards to newcomers being scared away by criticism on Stack Overflow: I completely sympathize with this point of view. New Python programmers and new programmers especially should not worry about what is &quot;pythonic&quot; until they&#x27;ve become comfortable with their own Python programming abilities. Working and readable code is most important, idiomatic code is simply icing on the cake.<p>I do however value discussions of what is &quot;pythonic&quot;. I often discuss &quot;pythonic&quot; in my classes to instill the idea that community norms change from language to language and even between frameworks and projects.<p>I really hope the wording of this post didn&#x27;t come off as elitist. If so, I will certainly need to reconsider my wording for the next one.