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“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 3 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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js2 ◴[12 Jul 18 16:15 UTC] No.17516019[source]▶
Background ("PEP 572 and decision-making in Python"):

https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/

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jcelerier ◴[12 Jul 18 16:26 UTC] No.17516132[source]▶
> The problem with the C-style of assignments is that it leads to this classic error: if(x = 0) {...}

yeah, if you code on 20 years old compilers with no warnings. GCC 4.1 warns about this (with -Wall) and Clang 3.4 warns about this too, without any warning flag.

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Waterluvian ◴[12 Jul 18 16:29 UTC] No.17516174[source]▶
I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this.

"Shooting yourself in the foot is your fault for not using a linter that detects accidental misuse of assignment!"

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jcelerier ◴[12 Jul 18 16:32 UTC] No.17516217[source]▶
> I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this.

Depends on what you think the answer to "is programming an art or a science" is. People who build bridges are absolutely subject to "strong opinions" on how to build bridges. I am of the opinion that shipping software to others when under a contract without using all the facilities available to prevent problems - linting, static type checking, etc - should be considered at best a breach of contract and ideally criminal negligence.

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woah ◴[12 Jul 18 17:33 UTC] No.17516818{3}[source]▶
Thinking that linting and static typing will stop all errors is foolish (although I prefer both, myself). Cargo culting "best practices" is often useless, and is sometimes used as a crutch by developers who are bad at the much more important and much less quantifiable things, like code readability and architectural simplicity.

Wanting your pet coding preferences to be enforced by criminal law is a sadomasochistic fantasy.

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jcelerier ◴[12 Jul 18 18:47 UTC] No.17517481{4}[source]▶
> Thinking that linting and static typing will stop all errors is foolish (although I prefer both, myself).

Thinking that putting a seatbelt will prevent death in a crash is foolish, and yet they are still mandatory

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1. mkesper ◴[12 Jul 18 20:41 UTC] No.17518410{5}[source]▶
Here you are very wrong. Look at https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbelts/facts.html#... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt
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2. jcelerier ◴[12 Jul 18 21:51 UTC] No.17518926[source]▶
that's exactly what I mean. Seatbelts won't save you every time but they save you enough times that they are mandatory.

> In another study that examined injuries presenting to the ER pre- and post-seat belt law introduction, it was found that 40% more escaped injury and 35% more escaped mild and moderate injuries.[83]

I don't know how many bugs can use of all possible explicit typing and compiler warnings avert but I'd wager that it would be at least as high a percentage.

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3. wrmsr ◴[13 Jul 18 00:38 UTC] No.17519733[source]▶
And as a former motorcyclist the idea of putting a seatbelt on a bike is terrifying, but under the umbrella of 'mandatory' I'd have to risk getting cut in half in a fender bender 'because that's how it's done'. If you blindly follow guidelines without understanding why they were put in place and when they should be circumvented you do more harm than good. In this context specifically, a python thread, I've not even found formatters that 'just work' in python to the degree that they do in java - I get and support significant whitespace but that combined with the crazy calling convention frequently lead me to just have to suffix spans of lines with noqa because I'm communicating to the reader something that a dumb bot doesn't understand. And that's not even getting into the heavier stuff, I type annotate everything but mypy is beyond useless for my relevant codebases - it no longer just outputs walls of useless noise it straight up crashes, from the most minimal use of even descriptors much less metaclasses. Tools and policies are essential but at the end of the day humans and situations are still currently authoritative.