I first heard the term "syntactic sugar" from Professor Hal Abelson when I took 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Since then, the concept has driven many features in many languages. But the downside is that most programmers learn very little about "what goes on under the hood". This is usually not an impediment to doing productive work, but there are situations (situations requiring close attention to performance, resource usage, security, et al) where deeper understanding is critical. For almost 20 years I have held a consistent opinion, which was first articulated to me by Joel Spolsky in one of his "Joel on Software" articles, that knowledge of the mechanics underlying runtime execution is one of the key things that separates "software engineers" from "coders". This podcast dives into these topics for one of the most highly used languages...Python. https://lnkd.in/ed2WqqyQ
