Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's Coming in Python 3.8

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 558 posts

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#441

Post by megla_ »

hathawsh wrote: post #138
txcwpalpha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> := is the assignment operator in tons of languages It is? Which ones? Other than Go, I can not think of a single language that has ":=" as an operator. Java does not, JavaScript does not, C/C++ do not, Ruby does not, I don't think PHP does, Erlang/Elixir do not, Rust does not... (I could be wrong on these, but I've personally never seen it in any of these languages and I can't find any mention of it in these langua…

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#... At least 18 prominent languages use that syntax.

I genuinely haven't heard of 13 of those and I'd say I'm quite interested in learning about languages. The few that I know, were just briefly mentioned by a professor, so I don't know anything apart from the name.

What qualifies as prominent to you? How old are you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact on new languages, but most of them were made ~50 years ago.

So many new languages were developed since then, which are far more useful and prominent than these legacy ones. If almost none of the modern ones have implemented it so far, is it really that useful/needed?

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#442

Post by agumonkey »

theplague42 wrote: post #21
sametmax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-strings have appeared 2 versions ago. All in all, the feedback we have has been overwhelmingly positive, including on maintenance and readability.

I second this. F-strings make string formatting so much more concise. I'm excited about the walrus operator for the same reason.

f-strings allow mutation ?

mutation is tricky, a whole field of programming language research is built on avoiding mutation

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#443

Post by masklinn »

nerdponx wrote: post #100
voldacar wrote: post #8

Python looks more and more foreign with each release. I'm not sure what happened after 3.3 but it seems like the whole philosophy of "pythonic", emphasizing simplicity, readability and "only one straightforward way to do it" is rapidly disappearing.

Can you give an example of something like this happening to the language? IMO 3.6+ brought many positive additions to the language, which I also think are needed as its audience grows and its use cases expand accordingly. The walrus operator makes while loops easier to read, write and reason about. Type annotations were a necessary and IMO delightful addition to the language as people started writing bigger productio…

> F strings are %-based interpolation done right, and the sooner the latter are relegated to "backward compatibility only" status the better. They are also more visually consistent with format strings.

No, f-strings handle a subset of %-based interpolation. They're nice and convenient but e.g. completely unusable for translatable resources (so is str.format incidentally).

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#444

Post by coldtea »

megla_ wrote: post #441
hathawsh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#... At least 18 prominent languages use that syntax.

I genuinely haven't heard of 13 of those and I'd say I'm quite interested in learning about languages. The few that I know, were just briefly mentioned by a professor, so I don't know anything apart from the name. What qualifies as prominent to you? How old are you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact o…

>I genuinely haven't heard of at least a third of them and I'd say I'm quite interested in trying new (and possibly unusual) languages.

But perhaps not as interested in trying old and significant languages?

>What qualifies as prominent to you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact on new languages, but most of them were made ~50 years ago.

Well, Lisp was made 60+ years ago, and C 50 years ago, so?

Besides Go, Smalltalk, Ada, and Pascal would be significant languages in any book, and I'd add Simula, Oberon, Eiffel, and Dylan to the list.

Seriously, if one haven't at least heard of Simula (the father language of OO) I'm not sure how qualified they are to pass PL judgement.

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#445

Post by coldtea »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #174
hathawsh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#... At least 18 prominent languages use that syntax.

That's more than I was aware of, but I would hardly call 90% of those "prominent". Sorry to any fans of those languages, but I doubt even most people here on HN have even heard about over half of the languages in that ":=" list.

If someone is not, not a user, but familiar with ALGOL, Simula, Pascal, Modula, Ada, PL/M, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Oberon, they should not really promote their programming language ideas as relevant...

The fact that they use some "new languages" (e.g. whatever derivative stuff happens to be in fashion atm) and are not even aware of the debt of those languages to the list above, doesn't qualify them...

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#446

Post by masklinn »

riffraff wrote: post #365
Razengan wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The '*' and '/' in function parameter lists for positional/keyword arguments look particularly ugly and unintuitive to me. More magic symbols to memorize or look up.

I also cannot honestly think of a case where I want that behaviour. The "pow" example looks more like a case where the C side should be fixed.

> I also cannot honestly think of a case where I want that behaviour.

There's plenty of situations where a named argument does not help, and encoding it can only hurt. It makes little to no sense to name the first argument to `dict.update` for instance. Or the argument to `ord`.

That, incidentally, is why Swift added support for positional-only parameters (though it has no concept of keyword-or-positional).

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#447

Post by masklinn »

thomasahle wrote: post #262
stefco_ wrote: post #146

There's a lot of talk in this thread about Python going down-hill and becoming less obvious/simple. I rather like modern python, but I agree that some features (like async/await, whose implementation fractures functions and libraries into two colors [0]) seem like downgrades in "Pythonicity". That said, I think some things have unquestionably gotten more "Pythonic" with time, and the := operator is one of those. In c…

The problem with `while line := f.readline():` is that it takes preasure of library writers. You should really just do `for line in f:`. If the library only has a `next` function, it needs to be fixed.

`f` might be iterable / iterator with completely different semantics than doing by-line iteration. And that might even be a good idea.

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#448

Post by orf »

newen wrote: post #333
orf wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing the entirely broken string/bytes mess up in Python 2 was worth it by itself. For bonus points old style classes went away, and the language got a significant speed boost. And now it’s not going to die a slow death, choking on the past poor decisions it’s burdened with. Trivializing that by suggesting it was some offhand, unneeded solution to a problem that some dreamy “language designer” thought up is at best…

Maybe it's work if you get paid by lines of code and JIRA tickets but programming is just a tool for me to my real work done. So I would like to spend as little time programming as I possibly can.

Nobody here gets paid per Jira ticket or line of code.

Sure, if you don’t program and just write ad-hoc (unmaintainable?) scripts then the transition is annoying. But it’s also not required. Don’t re-write your scripts, you can always ensure that Python 2 is present.

But if you’re maintaining a project that uses the wider ecosystem, then you are at the mercy of that ecosystem. And, at the time of the decision to make Python 3, that ecosystem was saying “Python 2 has a lot of horrible legacy decisions that make it harder than it should be to write good code”.

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#449

Post by elcritch »

agumonkey wrote: post #438
elcritch wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree this python version is as readable and here’s why. It’s about as many characters but more complex. The Kotlin version performs several distinct actions, each being clear to its purpose. These actions have the same syntax (eg requires less parsing effort). The Python version mixes at least 4 different language syntax/features, being list comprehension, if special form in the list comprehension, keywords, an…

I think you're all fighting for nothing here. The map filter chaining is obviously simpler, but python code is not that difficult and it's a no brainer task anyway.

It's true the Python is still relatively easy. It may only take, say, 1.3 sec vs 1.1 to parse, but it adds up.

Re: What's Coming in Python 3.8

#450

Post by throw2016 »

teddyh wrote: post #24
voldacar wrote: post #8

Python looks more and more foreign with each release. I'm not sure what happened after 3.3 but it seems like the whole philosophy of "pythonic", emphasizing simplicity, readability and "only one straightforward way to do it" is rapidly disappearing.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the n…

This 'resistance to change' catchall argument puts everything beyond criticism, and it can be used/abused in every case of criticism. It seeks to reframe 'change' from a neutral word - change can be good or bad - to a positive instead of focusing on the specifics.

Anyone making this argument should be prepared to to accept every single criticism they make in their life moving forward can be framed as 'their resistance to change'.

This kind of personalization of specific criticism is disingenuous and political and has usually been used as a PR strategy to push through unpopular decisions. Better to respond to specific criticisms than reach for a generic emotional argument that seeks to delegitimize scrutiny and criticism.

Post reply on HN