How to Write the Worst Possible Python Code (Humor)

How to Write the Worst Possible Python Code (Humor)
effective-programmer.com

Weird. You almost never need to do string eval in python, and whenever there is something where you think you need eval there is a better and safer way to achieve the same result.

Also, I was bending my brain but I couldn’t really figure out what this eval was for until I wrote out some scratch code myself to figure it out.

Turns out this 5 lines or so was constructing a string to do dict lookup and then evalling that. So say you have a dict d = {‘foo’: ‘bar’} and you have a variable i=foo and want to look up d[i], instead of just doing that it was doing something like

   eval(‘d[‘+i+’]’)

So I rejected the change and they came back with “but we’ve always done it that way”. I grep the codebase and yes. There were about 200+ uses of eval, all of which were constructing a string to look something up in a dictionary and then evaling the result. Some person who clearly didn’t program in python had found this twisted way to look things up in a dictionary and then this team had dutifully copied and pasted it throughout the codebase.

[1] ie I wasn’t there from the start of the project

    image.size
    ndarray.shape

Trick question of course, it's (height, width, channels) for numpy. numpy is fairly well known though and sort of gets away with it, but when your never-seen-before internal company starts doing this, well...