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

Post by bilalq » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

Post by kazinator » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

justsomehnguy wrote: post #77

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…

@" here strings in PS are fine for this purpose and even allows whitespace anywhere but because of the latter you can't indent it with your other code "@ -split "`r`n" | % {' {0} ' -f $_ } here strings in PS are fine for this purpose and even allows whitespace anywhere but because of the latter you can't indent it with your other code

Post by bokchoi » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:56 PM UTC

dpedu wrote: post #93

usrbinbash wrote: post #11

Literally the second item in the "Zen of Python" ( https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ ): Explicit is better than implicit. And yet, s = ["one", "two" "three"] will implicitly and silently do something, that is probably wrong most of the time.

Hmmm, it sounds like you're expecting "two" and "three" to be separate list elements because of some sort of implicit behavior due to being written in a list context. This is the opposite of what "Explicit is better than implicit" means. This is a list and you must explicitly place a comma when you want to start a new element in the list. Is there ever a time a new element follows a previous one and is NOT separated…

Post by aeturnum » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

aylmao wrote: post #99

aeturnum wrote: post #87

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 t…

The lack of a static type-system is IMO what makes these one-character mistakes very annoying. The compiler can't tell you something is wrong, so you're just left to figure out why things are broken, just to realize it was the smallest of typos.

Post by kazinator » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

NoahTheDuke wrote: post #131

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…

> Another one is having to import everything you use. The alternative is what exactly? Have the entire standard library exposed at once? Make all modules create non-conflicting names for exported objects, so that the json parse function has to be called json_parse and the csv parse function has to be called csv_parse? Seems less than ideal to me.

  csv.parse(...)

  import csv