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230 points craigkerstiens | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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kingkilr ◴[] No.42576212[source]
I would strongly implore people not to follow the example this post suggests, and write code that relies on this monotonicity.

The reason for this is simple: the documentation doesn't promise this property. Moreover, even if it did, the RFC for UUIDv7 doesn't promise this property. If you decide to depend on it, you're setting yourself up for a bad time when PostgreSQL decides to change their implementation strategy, or you move to a different database.

Further, the stated motivations for this, to slightly simplify testing code, are massively under-motivating. Saving a single line of code can hardly be said to be worth it, but even if it were, this is a problem far better solved by simply writing a function that will both generate the objects and sort them.

As a profession, I strongly feel we need to do a better job orienting ourselves to the reality that our code has a tendency to live for a long time, and we need to optimize not for "how quickly can I type it", but "what will this code cost over its lifetime".

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braiamp ◴[] No.42576752[source]
I don't think most people will heed this warning. I warned people in a programming forum that Python ordering of objects by insertion time was a implementation detail, because it's not guaranteed by any PEP [0]. I could literally write a PEP compliant Python interpreter and could blow up in someone's code because they rely on the CPython interpreter behavior.

[0]: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-December/1...

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1. kstrauser ◴[] No.42576959[source]
That definitely was true, and I use to jitter my code a little to deliberately find and break tests that depended on any particular ordering.

It's now explicitly documented to be true, and you can officially rely on it. From https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#dict:

> Changed in version 3.7: Dictionary order is guaranteed to be insertion order.

That link documents the Python language's semantics, not the behavior of any particular interpreter.