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Python’s new t-strings

(davepeck.org)
620 points tambourine_man | 2 comments | 21 Apr 25 04:31 UTC | HN request time: 1.03s | source
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serbuvlad ◴[21 Apr 25 09:51 UTC] No.43750075[source]▶
All things considered, this is pretty cool. Basically, this replaces

    db.execute("QUERY WHERE name = ?", (name,))
with

    db.execute(t"QUERY WHERE name = {name}")
Does the benefit from this syntactic sugar outweigh the added complexity of a new language feature? I think it does in this case for two reasons:

1. Allowing library developers to do whatever they want with {} expansions is a good thing, and will probably spawn some good uses.

2. Generalizing template syntax across a language, so that all libraries solve this problem in the same way, is probably a good thing.

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rwmj ◴[21 Apr 25 11:03 UTC] No.43750513[source]▶
I did a safe OCaml implementation of this about 20 years ago, the latest version being here:

https://github.com/darioteixeira/pgocaml

Note that the variables are safely and correctly interpolated at compile time. And it's type checked across the boundary too, by checking (at compile time) the column types with the live database.

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tasuki ◴[21 Apr 25 11:39 UTC] No.43750774[source]▶
Yes, what you did is strictly more powerful than what the Python people did. And you did it 20 years ago. Well done, have an upvote. And yet, here we are in 2025 with Python popularity growing unstoppably and (approximately) no one caring about OCaml (and all the other languages better than Python). It makes me sad.
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skeledrew ◴[21 Apr 25 18:39 UTC] No.43755054[source]▶
It's interesting how the majority has explicitly chosen NOT to use the "better" languages. Is the majority really that bad in their judgment? Or is it that "better" is actually defined by adoption over time?
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daedrdev ◴[21 Apr 25 19:16 UTC] No.43755431[source]▶
It's clearly better in their opinion, they just aren't optimizing for the same metrics that you are. Python is better because it's easy for people to learn, imo.
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throwawaymaths ◴[21 Apr 25 19:50 UTC] No.43755740[source]▶
its not easy to learn. its a challenge even getting it installed and running. what even is a venv? how do you explain that to a beginner?

python is popular because its what teachers teach.

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1. acdha ◴[21 Apr 25 20:35 UTC] No.43756172[source]▶
You don’t need to teach it to a beginner. The first of learning doesn’t need more than the standard library and when you need more than that you’re either giving them the single command necessary to run or, more likely, having them use a template project where a tool like Poetry is doing that automatically.

What this usually hits isn’t that managing Python packages is hard in 2025 but that many people do not learn how their operating system works conceptually until the first time they learn to program and it’s easy to conflate that with the first language you learn.

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2. throwawaymaths ◴[22 Apr 25 04:32 UTC] No.43759089[source]▶
> You don’t need to teach it to a beginner.

gp's claim was:

> Python is better because it's easy for people to learn,

i believe then we agree: it is not.