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

Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

sebsite.pw

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 234 posts

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#151

Post by YuechenLi »

Chinjut wrote: post #142
YuechenLi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, by "significant whitespace" I meant whitespace sensitive indentation, which I think Python and YAML are the only languages that has that feature.

Haskell, Lean, and Agda too. But even if Python were the only one, it wouldn't be weird to someone for whom this was their first programming language. It would just seem the way programming languages are. There's nothing intrinsically weird about indentation being significant. It's quite visibly part of the code you write and read.

Hmm. Learned something new today. Thanks.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#152

Post by toast0 »

Chinjut wrote: post #142
YuechenLi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, by "significant whitespace" I meant whitespace sensitive indentation, which I think Python and YAML are the only languages that has that feature.

Haskell, Lean, and Agda too. But even if Python were the only one, it wouldn't be weird to someone for whom this was their first programming language. It would just seem the way programming languages are. There's nothing intrinsically weird about indentation being significant. It's quite visibly part of the code you write and read.

> There's nothing intrinsically weird about indentation being significant. It's quite visibly part of the code you write and read.

The idea is fine, I guess, although I certainly don't care for it. Where it gets most nasty is that whitespace that looks the same (in your editor) might not be equal and will cause you pain.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#153

Post by Lvl999Noob »

dwattttt wrote: post #40
Animats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misery is trying to retrofit "bool", True/False, and nil/null to a language. C had to do that. Python had to do that. Getting those wrong is one of the classic language design mistakes. It seems like treating "True" as a value that equates to 1 will work, but then the special cases get you. Like being able to perform arithmetic on True. Common language design boners: - Not building in strings. That's now in the past.…

> Not having arrays of bits. Pascal had PACKED ARRAY[0..N] of BOOLEAN but that was lost in later languages. It's useful to have that as a language construct, because most modern CPUs have good hardware for dealing with bit strings, and you'd like the compiler to use it. I'm not sure exactly which features are responsible (I'm inclined to blame templates), but C++'s std::vector is a rough edge. For those unfamiliar, t…

Agreed. Instead of special casing Boolean arrays to be packed, it's better to have standard Boolean arrays and bitarrays as separate types.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#154

Post by Izkata »

Daishiman wrote: post #146
frollogaston wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those are stuff I'd never do like `Test.prototype = null;`. Some are legit footguns, but they rarely get in your way. Python has weird file imports (no relative ones either), broken package management, historical differences between asyncio and blocking that still cause issues, threading/GIL caveats that trip up even experienced users, indentation for scope (esp weird given it was designed for REPL), weirdly…

What you put as an example isn't a footgun if you know how the language evaluation rules work. Once you understand that the "footgun" explains a dozen behaviors, which may be a weird behavior but it is consistent.

Which isn't really much of a refutation because you can say the exact same thing about what's on wtfjs.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#155

Post by Izkata »

joaohaas wrote: post #124
jrrv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked on half a dozen of these at random and none of them are weird. For example, why would you expect `Boolean("false")` to equal `false`? It's a string, and bears no relation to the Boolean type. [0] [0] https://wtfjs.com/wtfs/2014-10-07-true-equals-false

What about the fact that there isn't a single 'parseInt' function in JS that can reliably only convert number strings to numbers? They each have different quirks (some will parse 'a123' as 123, others will handle scientific notation etc). The only reliable way of doing this is doing a regex followed by parseInt... which is definitely a footgun IMO.

Unary "+" returns NaN for strings that don't contain exactly a number (except for empty string which standard type conversion turns into 0). It even works for scientific notation like +'1e3' === 1000.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#156

Post by DangitBobby »

Izkata wrote: post #154
Daishiman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you put as an example isn't a footgun if you know how the language evaluation rules work. Once you understand that the "footgun" explains a dozen behaviors, which may be a weird behavior but it is consistent.

Which isn't really much of a refutation because you can say the exact same thing about what's on wtfjs.

There's really no comparison. I use both languages extensively and JavaScript is by far the quirkier language.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#157

Post by AdieuToLogic »

frollogaston wrote: post #92
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python's strength is that it's easy to make C libs work in it. SWIG[0] makes working with C libraries trivial for over a dozen programming languages; Perl, Python, and Ruby included. 0 - https://www.swig.org/

There are reasons all those Py libraries with C code didn't just do it in SWIG.

> There are reasons all those Py libraries with C code didn't just do it in SWIG.

And those reasons are?

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#158

Post by Izkata »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #133
stouset wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default. Ruby has such a nice holistic consistency to it. With a few exceptions, it feels like it was conceived of by one person with a core idea in mind. Python feels like a mess.

> I’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default. This is just my personal opinion with no data to back it up, but I suspect that Python "won" because it has excellent Windows support, while Ruby doesn't. Even a decade ago, Python's website offered an official native Windows inst…

> but I suspect that Python "won" because it has excellent Windows support, while Ruby doesn't. Even a decade ago, Python's website offered an official native Windows installer

I think you might be able to go an additional decade backwards. Back in college most of my friends were on windows and one of them was using python for class projects.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#159

Post by jMyles »

JoBrad wrote: post #129
jMyles wrote: post #16

I made a constant library for python which I liked some years ago. I wonder if any of my ideas made it in: https://github.com/nucypher/constantSorrow/blob/master/tests...

That’s a fun library :)

Yeah it was a blast to make. If memory serves, a significant piece was over a very lovely and piney joint with Kieran Prasch at an airbnb in... Seattle?

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#160

Post by jamesfinlayson »

neillyons wrote: post #19

I remember reading that in early versions of Python there was no built in True and False. Each user would implement this themselves as True = 1 False = 0 then later these got added to the language. In Python 2 you could still reassign and swap them so that 'if False' was actually true! True, False = False, True Python 3 you could no longer reassign them.

Yes I remember a friend doing university marking for a beginners programming course years ago and some student had managed to swap True and False making their assignment very wonky.
Post reply on HN