Discussion on: What simple things annoy you about your favourite programming languages?

[Álister Machado dos Reis]

The fact that, in Python, "joining an array using a given string" is phrased as "use this string to join an array".

# this does not work, sadly
['a','b','c'].join('-')

# this works
'-'.join(['a','b','c'])

Now I'm used to it, but I used to get it wrong all the time, because 'join' is an active verb, so at least for me it makes sense to put it after the thing being joined.

[edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y]

Yup, I get that wrong every time I attempt to join an array. Logically join should either be a part of the array type or a standalone function.

[Marlysson Silva]

I never understand why join is applying in separator passing the list to join them..

[Graham Lyons]

It's because the argument to join can be anything that you can iterate over e.g. list, tuple, array etc. Python tends to make functions take duck-typed arguments rather than having interface-style compatibility on types.