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Left to Right Programming

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191–200 of 372 posts

Re: Left to Right Programming

#191

Post by de6u99er »

juancn wrote: post #39

SQL shows it's age by having exactly the same problem. Queries should start by the `FROM` clause, that way which entities are involved can be quickly resolved and a smart editor can aid you in writing a sensible query faster. The order should be FROM -> SELECT -> WHERE, since SELECT commonly gives names to columns, which WHERE will reference. You could even avoid crap like `SELECT * FROM table`, and just write `FROM…

You can always start with the FROM clause and then add the SELECT clause above it if it's a out auto-,completion.

I usually start with: ``` select * from as limit 5 ```

Re: Left to Right Programming

#192

Post by scuff3d »

Philpax wrote: post #144
scuff3d wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A not insignificant number of functional languages disagree. You often read functional code from the inside out, which basically means you're reading right to left as you move up function calls. For the record though, "it's more readable" is a much better argument then "LSP mad"

Right-to-left is equivalent to left-to-right in this regard: you're still reading in one linear direction, as opposed to Python, where you have to read inside-out and revisit later parts of the line to correctly understand previous parts of the line.

Fair enough. And like I said, you're argument is certainly better than the article's.

I'm not really a fan of list comprehensions, I usually just use for loops. It does seem consistent with Pythons syntax though. For loop is `for item in items` and comprehensions have 'item for item in items'.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#193

Post by jimbokun »

taeric wrote: post #106
juancn wrote: post #39

SQL shows it's age by having exactly the same problem. Queries should start by the `FROM` clause, that way which entities are involved can be quickly resolved and a smart editor can aid you in writing a sensible query faster. The order should be FROM -> SELECT -> WHERE, since SELECT commonly gives names to columns, which WHERE will reference. You could even avoid crap like `SELECT * FROM table`, and just write `FROM…

My main caveat here, is that often the person starting a select knows what they want to select before they know where to select it from. To that end, having autocomplete for the sources of columns is far far more useful than autocomplete for columns from a source. I will also hazard a guess that the total number of columns most people would need autocomplete for are rather limited? Such that you can almost certainly…

I can’t think of an example where I knew the columns I wanted to select before I knew which table I wanted to select them from.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#194

Post by jimbokun »

taeric wrote: post #150
jayd16 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems nonsensical. Column names have no meaning without the table. Table is the object, columns are the properties. What language goes Property.Object? All popular languages have this wrong?

I'm assuming you are largely just not thinking this one through? We are not modeling the domain, we are describing some data we want to select. Without knowing how it is modeled, I can give a brief "top line" for expected select statements on many data models. "I want average_weather, year, zip_code", "I want year, college_name, degree_name, median_graduate_salary, mean_graduate_salary", "..." I don't think it is tou…

How did you know it was zip_code and not ZipCode?

Maybe in this case you know the same naming conventions are enforced across all tables. But in general it’s difficult to know the exact column name without looking it up first.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#195

Post by 6yyyyyy »

nxobject wrote: post #89

A minor corollary to this is that, as the user types, IDEs should predictably try to make programs valid – e.g. via structured editing, balancing parens in Lisp like paredit, etc.

Please no. I hate when the editor adds random shit I didn't type to the file.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#196

Post by jimbokun »

noosphr wrote: post #166
danielPort9 wrote: post #21

Don’t know why python gets so much love. It’s a painful language as soon as more than one person is involved. What the author describes is just the tip of the iceberg

Because everything that tries to fix it is just as painful in different ways. I've had the displeasure of working in codebases using the style of programming op says is great. It's pretty neat. Until you get a chain 40 deep and you have to debug it. You either have to use language features, like show in pyspark, which don't scale when you need to trace a dozen transformations, or you get back to imperative style loop…

Then add some variables for intermediate results.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#197

Post by valcron1000 »

projektfu wrote: post #113
dismalaf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Haskell there's also dot (edit - my bad, not dot, pipe) syntax which allows composing functions left to right. I believe Nim also has it. Just as a few more examples.

f . g is still doing g first, then f, right? Haskell has pipelines in the Flow library. https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/flow-2.0.0.9/doc...

No need to import a third party library: you can use `Data.Function ((&))` for this:

    arg
     & f1
     & f2
     & f3

Re: Left to Right Programming

#198

Post by hagendaasalpine »

levocardia wrote: post #177
aquafox wrote: post #72

The consensus here seems to be that Python is missing a pipe operator. That was one of the things I quickly learned to appreciate when transitioning from Mathematica to R. It makes writing data science code, where the data are transformed by a series of different steps, so much more readable and intuitive. I know that Python is used for many more things than just data science, so I'd love to hear if in these other co…

The pipe operator in R (really, tidyverse R, which might as well be its own language) is one of its "killer apps" for me. Working with data is so, so pleasant and easy. I remember a textbook that showed two ways of "coding" a cookie recipe: bake(divide(add(knead(mix(flour, water, sugar, butter)),eggs),12),450,12) versus mix(flour, water, sugar, butter) %>% knead() %>% add(eggs) %>% divide(12) %>% bake(temp=450, minut…

pandas and polars both have pipe methods available on dataframes. you can method chain to the same effect. it's considered best practise in pandas as you're hopefully not mutating the initial df

Re: Left to Right Programming

#199

Post by sriku »

This is almost FP vs OOP religious war in disguise. Similar to vim-vs-emacs ... where op comes first in vim but selection comes first in emacs.

If you design something to "read like English", you'll likely get verb-first structure - as embodied in Lisp/Scheme. Other languages like German, Tamil use verbs at the end, which aligns well with OOP-like "noun first" syntax. (It is "water drink" word for word in Tamil but "drink water" in English.) So Forth reads better than Scheme if you tend to verbalize in Tamil. Perhaps why I feel comfy using vim than emacs.

Neither is particularly better or worse than the other and tools can be built appropriately. More so with language models these days.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#200

Post by necovek »

In Rust, for..in loops have the same problem: you don't know the type and shape of the thing you are iterating on before you get to the "in" part. "Luckily", it does not allow you to call any methods on the object before you do.

Similarly, Python list/dict/set comprehensions are a form of for-loop syntax sugar to easily create particular structure. One can use functools.maps to get exactly the same behavior of Rust example.

If this was an all important text input microoptimization, we'd all be doing everything with pure functions like Lisp: yet somehow, functional languages are not the most popular even if they provide the highest syntax consistency.

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