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
Left to Right Programming
21–30 of 372 posts
Re: Left to Right Programming
#22While methods partially solve this problem, they cannot be used if you are not the author of the type. Languages with uniform function call syntax like Nim or D do this better.
Re: Left to Right Programming
#23Don’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
It’s a good language for beginners and, unfortunately, many people think that learning more languages is hard and useless.
Re: Left to Right Programming
#24len(list(filter(lambda line: all([abs(x) >= 1 and abs(x) 0 for x in line]) or all([x This really isn’t fair on Python. Python isn’t very much not designed for this style of functional programming. Plus you haven’t broken lines where you could. Rewrite it as a list comprehension and add line breaks, and turn the inner list comprehensions into generator expressions (`all([…])` → `all(…)`), and change `abs(x) >= 1 and a…
abs(x) >= 1 and abs(x) Is also unidiomatic in Python. 1 Means the same thing and tightens it up a bit, and reads better since it's indicating that you're testing if something is in a range more clearly. EDIT: To add: The filter, list construction, and len aren't needed either. It's just: sum(map(predicate, diffs)) # this counts the number of elements in diffs which satisfy predicate, map is lazy so no big memory over…
Ooh yes, thanks, I didn’t even think about that, I was too focused on the other parts. Much nicer, updated.
Re: Left to Right Programming
#25Don’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
Maybe even painful for one dev once you need dependencies (virtualenv...)
Re: Left to Right Programming
#26Don’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
I find myself writing a very simple style of python that avoids list comprehensions and so on when working in a shared code base.
For a language where there is supposed to be only one way to do things, there are an awful lot of ways to do things.
Don’t get me wrong, writing a list comprehension can be very satisfying and golf-y But if there should be one way to do things, they do not belong.
Re: Left to Right Programming
#27This is it right here. I love the Python ecosystem but if I can find a JS alternative I'm using that for ergonomics.
Re: Left to Right Programming
#28I don't think making your tools happy is a particularly valid reason to code in one style vs another.
Left-to-right is also much easier to wrap your head around. Just imagine the data going on a conveyor belt with a bunch of machines instead of having to wrangle a nested tree.
Re: Left to Right Programming
#29I'm curious on how much of this is basically overcome by the new tools? As much as vibe coding annoys me, I can't argue against how good autocomplete from these LLMs can be.
Very human of us to spend billions of dollars and tons of electricity to bang our programming languages into shape since sane syntax is slightly uncomfortable the first 10 minutes you work with it. I believe there are some strongly typed stack based languages where you really always do have something very close to a syntactically correct program as you type. But now that LLMs exist to paper over our awful intuitions,…
I'm honestly not sure how I feel on it, all told.
On one level, I do prefer my code to be readable left to right and top to bottom. This, typically, means the big "narrative" functions up top and any supporting functions will come after they were used. Ideally, you could read those as "details" after you have understood the overall flow.
On another level, though, it isn't like this is how most things are done. Yes, you want a general flow that makes sense in one direction through text. But this often has major compromises and is not the norm. Directly to programming, trying to make things context free is just not something that works in life.
Directly to this discussion, I'm just not sure how much I care about small context-free parts of the code?
Tangential to this discussion, I oddly hate comprehensions in python. I have yet to get where I can type those directly. And, though I'm asking if LLM tools are making this OBE, I don't use those myself. :(
Re: Left to Right Programming
#30> If you aren’t familiar with Rust syntax, |argument| result is an anonymous function equivalent to function myfunction(argument) { return result; }. > Here, your program is constructed left to right. The first time you type line is the declaration of the variable. As soon as you type line., your editor is able to suggest available methods. Yeah, having LSP autocomplete here does feel nice. But it also makes the code…
> But it also makes the code harder to scan than Python. Quick readability at a glance seems like the bigger win than just better autocomplete. It depends a lot on what you’re accustomed to. You get used to whichever style. Just like different languages use different sentence order: subject, object and verb appear in all possible orders in different languages, and their speakers get along just fine. There are some si…
On the other hand, in Rust you often have to add something like
.unwrap().unwrap().into::>>()