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Left to Right Programming

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Re: Left to Right Programming

#91

Post by sgarland »

marcosdumay wrote: post #88
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…

The order should be starting on FROM, followed by any sequences of whatever clauses (except for FROM), always creating an intermediary result-set. FROM table -- equivalent to today's select * from table SELECT a, 1 as b, c, d -- equivalent to select ... from table WHERE a in (1, 2, 3) -- the above with the where GROUP BY c -- the above with the group by WHERE sum(d) > 100 -- the above with having sum(d) > 100 SELECT…

> always creating an intermediary result-set

You want the DB to first run SELECT * FROM , and then start operating on that?

Re: Left to Right Programming

#92

Post by mb7733 »

nxpnsv wrote: post #78
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…

I don't know if result = (df .pipe(fun1, arg1=1) .pipe(fun2, arg2=2) ) is much less readable than result fun1(., arg1=1) |> fun2(., arg2=2) but I guess the R thing also works beyond dataframes which is pretty cool

I haven't used R in forever, but is your `.` placeholder actually necessary? From my recollection of pipe operator the value being pipe piped is automatically as the first argument to the next function. That may have been a different implementation of a pipe operator though.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#93

Post by 0x696C6961 »

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…

It doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult to allow that form in a backwards compatible way. Why hasn't this happened?

Re: Left to Right Programming

#94

Post by sgarland »

adwn wrote: post #35
phkahler wrote: post #31

Disagree. The first example the author seem to want something more like imperative programming, so the "loop" construct would come first. But then the assignment should come last. With the python syntax you get the thing you're assigning first - near the equals sign - and then where it is selected from and with any filtering criteria. It makes perfect sense. If you disagree that's fine, the whole post is an opinion p…

> the whole post is an opinion piece. It's not. The author gives objective reasons why Python's syntax is inferior – namely, that it makes IDE support in the form of discoverability and auto-completion more difficult.

This presupposes that the reader likes or even uses auto-complete. I do not, and there are many others like me.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#95

Post by mb7733 »

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

I used to agree with this completely, but type annotations & checking have made it much more reasonable. I still wouldn't choose it for a large project, but types have made it much, much easier to work with others' python code.

Python with strict type checking and its huge stdlib is my favourite scripting language now.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#96

Post by hnlmorg »

xigoi wrote: post #23
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

It’s a good language for beginners and, unfortunately, many people think that learning more languages is hard and useless.

That’s also precisely the reason why we have the clusterfuck that is the JavaScript ecosystem.

People complain that we can’t have nice things. But even when we do, enough developers will be lazy enough not to learn them anyway.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#97

Post by rspencer »

papercrane wrote: post #85
rspencer wrote: post #73

I had a similar thought a few years ago with an Advent of Code problem for which my solution in python might have been max(map(sum, input_list.split(None))) To decipher this the eye has to jump to the middle of the line, move rightwards, then to the left to see the "map" then move right again to see what we are mapping and then all the way to the beginning to find the "max". The author would probably suggest rust's s…

> Though neither python nor rust have such a nice `.split(None)` built in. Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what `.split(None)` would do? My initial instinct is that would would return each character. i.e. `.chars()` in Rust or `list(s)` in Python.

It was intended to split a list of `int|None` into its non-none stretches. Much like how `string.split('x')` splits a string by matching the character 'x'

Re: Left to Right Programming

#98

Post by ebonnafoux »

sgarland wrote: post #69

Is the entire complaint that autocomplete doesn’t work well? Have you tried learning your language?

The way people code with Python is by using its large ecosystem, few people only use the standart library. No one knows all the API, the more discoverability there is, the better.

Re: Left to Right Programming

#99

Post by bear8642 »

papercrane wrote: post #85
rspencer wrote: post #73

I had a similar thought a few years ago with an Advent of Code problem for which my solution in python might have been max(map(sum, input_list.split(None))) To decipher this the eye has to jump to the middle of the line, move rightwards, then to the left to see the "map" then move right again to see what we are mapping and then all the way to the beginning to find the "max". The author would probably suggest rust's s…

> Though neither python nor rust have such a nice `.split(None)` built in. Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what `.split(None)` would do? My initial instinct is that would would return each character. i.e. `.chars()` in Rust or `list(s)` in Python.

>Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what `.split(None)` would do?

Reading the docs [0] it seems `.split(None)` returns an array of the indivual characters without whitespace - so something like [c in list(s) if not whitespace(c)]

[0] https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=...

Re: Left to Right Programming

#100

Post by orthoxerox »

0x696C6961 wrote: post #93
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…

It doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult to allow that form in a backwards compatible way. Why hasn't this happened?

Because SQL is a whole language family of separate languages grudgingly adopting new features introduced by the notoriously slow standartization committee.

BigQuery SQL and Spark SQL (and probably some others) have adopted pipelined syntax, DuckDB SQL simply allows you to write the query FROM-first.

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