First-Class: Luciano Ramalho’s Fluent Python

IN 2015, A SEMINAL BOOK on programming was released: ‘Fluent Python’¹ by Luciano Ramalho².

Many coding books can feel like remixes, with familiar content simply presented under different chapter titles and with varying code examples. However, ‘Fluent Python’ wasn’t just another of those books. It was both well-written and refreshingly original. The chapters brought to light lesser-known aspects of the Python language and programming at large.

It was the minutiae in the book that truly solidified my admiration.

That’s good. “First-class” as an adjective implies a categorization, an “elite” as he calls it. In reality, functions are always first-class in Python. First-class means the function can be assigned to a variable, sent along as arguments to other places, and returned from other functions. They don’t need to be executed immediately to be referenced or manipulated.

Sensitivity to language shows up throughout the book. For example, in another chapter – Chapter 18: Concurrency with Aysncio – Ramalho leads with this quote.

Ramalho’s first paragraph of that chapter then paraphrases a Hungarian-born Brazilian mathematician and computer scientist named Imre Simon³: "…[he] liked to say there are two major sins in science: using different words to mean the same thing and using one word to mean different things."

So, we see, great books are based on avoiding sins of language.

A few Sundays ago, I attended the last day of a local Python conference, PyBay. The wonderful conference is in its 4th year, and I’ve attended all but one of them.

Ramalho gave a talk called “Beyond Paradigms” at 4pm.⁴ There was another talk I wanted to attend, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to see the author of such an excellent book. I sat near the front. As expected, the talk was good.

During the question and answer session, a man a couple of rows behind me asked Ramalho for his thoughts on the practicality of learning new programming languages if one doesn’t have time to become an expert. The questioner cited the 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as supposedly necessary to reach expertise.

Ramalho first stated that the 10,000-hour rule is not accurate. I was pleased he began with this. Gladwell popularized the concept without providing enough context, and the leading academic on expertise, Anders Ericsson, from whom Gladwell drew, highlighted this issue.⁵

Regardless of expertise, Ramalho mentioned that learning new languages illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the languages we know best. This makes us better programmers in our primary languages. Ramalho himself is currently learning Elixir.⁶

Here are three more takeaways. Watch his talk⁷ and access the slides⁸:

1. Read only the first 30 pages of the Gang of Four book⁹. Ramalho suggests there’s no need to read beyond that.
2. Fixation on design patterns can lead us down the wrong path. Ramalho mentioned he spent many years tracking down a 1996 slide by the renowned computer scientist and director of research at Google, Peter Norvig. The slide states: “In a study of the Design Patterns book, 16 of the 23 patterns have qualitatively simpler implementations in Lisp or Dylan than in C++ for at least some uses of each pattern.”
3. Learn complementary languages. Engage with languages that offer different feature sets than your favorites. If you’re familiar with Python, it might not be as beneficial to learn Ruby, as these two languages share similar strengths and weaknesses. In contrast, Elixir and Go serve as good complements to Python/Ruby.