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5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

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Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#81

Post by jstx1 »

solox3 wrote: post #60
jstx1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the zen being wrong is kind of a meme at this point. The whole “only one obvious way to do it” isn’t just false but the exact opposite is true. Python is one of the most flexible languages with many many ways to do the same thing; more than any other language I can think of.

Notice that, in the original quote, There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. the author used two different ways of hyphenating (three, if you count the whole PEP 20). PEP 20 is clearly not meant to be taken as law. Nor PEP 8. Nor PEP 257. People frequently mistake "one obvious way" with "one way". There are lots of ways to iterate through something, for example, but there is really one ob…

> And the philosophy here still applies: when you read anyone else's python code, the obvious way is probably doing the obvious thing.

I don't get what you mean by this.

When I read someone else's code, what is obvious to me isn't necessarily what was obvious to the author. For an illustration of this, have a look at the day 1 solution thread from this year's Advent of Code - https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/r66vow/2021_d... (you can search for Python solutions) - and see how many different ways there are to solve a fairly straightforward problem.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#82

Post by kazinator »

Spivak wrote: post #54
kazinator wrote: post #18

Not in Lisp! ("foo" "bar") and ("foobar") are lists of length 2 and 1, respectively. (Python copies some bad ideas from C. Another one is having to import everything you use. It seems that since Python is written in C, its designer took it for granted that there will be something analogous to #include for using libraries, even standard ones that come with the language.) Implicit string literal catenation is tempting…

I'm gonna disagree on the import thing. Compared to Ruby where requires are magic bags of metaprogramming bullshit, Python is much much easier to reason about. It takes some getting used to that require 'json' actually adds methods to existing classes.

"require 'json'" is just another #include in disguise, and if it monkey patches existing classes, it ... probably should not exist in any form.

If the language supports json, it should just do that.

  1> #J[1,2,3]
  #(1.0 2.0 3.0)
  2> (get-json "[1,2,3,{\"foo\":true}]")
  #(1.0 2.0 3.0 #H(() ("foo" t)))
  3> (put-json #(1.0 2.0 t))
  [1,2,true]t

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#83

Post by wartijn_ »

pmontra wrote: post #26
Palomides wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it's based on the C behavior, where it can be handy with macros I don't think it fits well in python

Maybe. We must remember that Python was designed at the very end of the 80s so what was normal for developers back then could be unexpected nowadays. An example: the self in Python's OO is a C pointer to struct of data and function pointers. It should be perfectly clear to anybody writing OO code in plain C at the time (rising hand.) Five years later new OO languages (Java, Ruby) kept self inside the classes but hide…

But Python 3 was designed in the 2000s and had many breaking changes. Seems like they could have changed this behavior with that version.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#84

Post by voltagedivider »

samhw wrote: post #53
voltagedivider wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that common for all/most languages that don't require explicit typing?

It would be impossible in any language that requires either explicit typing or some kind of 'let' keyword. (Or, in the fringe case, a language like Go which uses a different operator for initialisation-plus-assignment.)

Exactly. That's why I asked about languages that don't require explicit typing. My point is that it's a feature of many languages rather than a Python idiosyncrasy.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#85

Post by ErikCorry »

dnautics wrote: post #58
silisili wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use plusses? Or perhaps a join func, which would accomplish the same. I get the use case as you described it, but it just seems like minimal effort to accomplish and have some semblance of explicit/safety.

or if that's the use case, require the whitespace to include a \n or \r\n... It's not like python doesn't have significant whitespace already.

That wouldn't fix most of the cases highighted by the tool in the article.

So strange that Python has completely different syntax from C, but they chose to copy this obscure syntactic feature _even though they have the plus operator on strings_.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#86

Post by [deleted] »

shultays wrote: post #59
colpabar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to comment something like "who would even use this?" and then I remembered that I have in fact used that feature :) It's a somewhat "nice" way to write long strings and keep the code from getting too wide. I never did it inside an array, but I found breaking up a long string into smaller ones and wrapping them in parens without a comma was convenient, for things like error messages. But that's just what c…

You could have the same behavior by enforcing + operation in between mylongstring = "hello" + "world" No idea if python's way of indentations allows this but sounds like it should

[deleted]

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#87

Post by aeturnum »

The high-level goals of python end up creating these little syntactic landmines that can get even experienced coders. My personal nomination for the worst one of these is that having a comma after a single value often (depending on the surrounding syntax) creates a tuple. It's easy to miss and creates maddening errors where nothing works how you expect.

I've moved away from working in Python in general, but I think the #1 feature I want in the core of the language is the ability to make violating type hints an exception[1]. The core team has been slowly integrating type information, but it feels like they have really struggled to articulate a vision about what type information is "for" in the core ecosystem. I think a little more opinion from them would go a long way to ecosystem health.

[1] I know there are libraries that do this, I am not seeking recommendations.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#88

Post by xigoi »

voltagedivider wrote: post #45
ErikCorry wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misspelling a variable on the lhs of an assignment just causes a new variable to be created with the new name. That's a lot worse in my book.

Isn't that common for all/most languages that don't require explicit typing?

JavaScript (strict mode) doesn't have explicit typing, but it still requires variables to be declared.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#89

Post by ErikCorry »

jve wrote: post #27
jollybean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5% of 'released' software is quite a lot, more importantly it's a class of errors that definitely should not exist. This is a 'bug' in the language effectively there just isn't any real upside. Python has a few of these things, which is really sad.

I checked those those 11 links to issues for major software. 10 bugs were actually in tests...

This is understandable since many of those projects are not written in python. So the python code in them is only in incidental scripts like test harnesses. If V8 was written in python then performance would probably not be very good.

Re: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

#90

Post by [deleted] »

oa2022 wrote: post #41
wodenokoto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rejection notice seems completely counter intuitive to me. How is adding a plus "harder" compared to removing a foot gun? > This PEP is rejected. There wasn't enough support in favor, the feature to be removed isn't all that harmful, and there are some use cases that would become harder.

This change would break a lot of legacy code for no good reason The most common way to split a string in lines is using this concatenation formula.

[deleted]
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