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Python’s new t-strings

(davepeck.org)
620 points tambourine_man | 9 comments | 21 Apr 25 04:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.831s | source | bottom
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nu11ptr ◴[21 Apr 25 11:07 UTC] No.43750542[source]▶
Personally, this feels like a feature that is too focused on one problem to be a general feature. Python is getting huge. When people ask me if Python is easy and simple to learn I have to say "the basics, yes, but to to learn the whole language... not so much".

I feel like in this sense Go really is interesting by rejecting almost every single feature. Honestly not sure generics were worth it as they add a lot of complexity, and while they are nice, I don't need them very much. The general idea to keep the language at its original focus is the right idea IMO. C++ would be the most extreme case where the language itself barely resembles what it started out as.

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1. murkt ◴[21 Apr 25 11:19 UTC] No.43750633[source]▶
This is a pretty simple and useful feature. I wouldn’t say that it bloats the language too much. Descriptors and metaclasses are much more complicated and have a lot more implications and have been in the language for a veeeeery long time. Is it decades already?
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2. pansa2 ◴[21 Apr 25 11:30 UTC] No.43750700[source]▶
Yeah, Python hasn’t been a simple language for a long time, if ever. That’s probably the biggest misconception about the language - that its friendly syntax implies simple semantics. It’s not true at all.
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3. tetha ◴[21 Apr 25 14:38 UTC] No.43752506[source]▶
I would say python in it's entirety is one of, if not the deepest and potentially most complex language I know. C++ is the other contender. The things you could do with metaclasses, multiple inheritance and operator overloading are quite staggering.

I'm just glad you don't have to think or even use this as a normal user of the language, most of the time or at all.

4. nu11ptr ◴[21 Apr 25 15:00 UTC] No.43752735[source]▶
This feature is not complicated, but one must keep every feature that can possibly be seen in code in their head. Even if it is familiar now, what happens when you use the feature in the one small section of code where it fits, nowhere else, and then read that code 2 years later? This is the problem with adding useful features that are only used in a few key places. I'm not saying Go is a perfect language, far from it, but limiting # of features as a general goal is something more languages should strive for IMO.
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5. murkt ◴[21 Apr 25 15:12 UTC] No.43752858[source]▶
I am not arguing against that language ideally should have less features. I am arguing with “Python is getting huge”, because it’s huge and has been for many-many years :)
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6. nu11ptr ◴[21 Apr 25 15:59 UTC] No.43753441{3}[source]▶
True - cat is well out of the bag at this point
7. kccqzy ◴[22 Apr 25 20:38 UTC] No.43766039[source]▶
A lot of Python's complexity like descriptors and metaclasses and the so-called cooperative multiple inheritance come from an era where object orientation is gospel and yet people keep finding limitations to what can be accomplished in an OO paradigm and therefore they patch up the language to support ever more complicated use cases.

I have a feeling that if metaclasses and descriptors were to be proposed today it would be laughed out of the PEP process completely.

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8. pansa2 ◴[22 Apr 25 23:21 UTC] No.43767213[source]▶
> I have a feeling that if metaclasses and descriptors were to be proposed today it would be laughed out of the PEP process completely.

I think you need at least one of these. Modern Python eschews metaclasses but descriptors are everywhere. Without them you couldn’t have @classmethod, @staticmethod nor @property - or at least, you couldn’t generalise custom method lookup and all three of those would need to be special cases.

The alternative approach is to drop descriptors and make method lookup much simpler, but then you need metaclasses (see: static methods in Ruby).

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9. kccqzy ◴[23 Apr 25 00:24 UTC] No.43767556{3}[source]▶
If descriptors didn't exist in the language, classmethod, staticmethod, and property would become keywords. Languages like Java and C++ already have static as a keyword; C++ also made its type system have a special pointer to member type; such behavior can be hardcoded without having a flexible descriptor mechanism.

Custom method lookup would just be the same as custom attributes, that is, by the user overriding __getattr__.