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Partially unrelated to the meme, but I find it almost malicious how some python keywords are named differently from the nearly universal counterpart of other languagues.
This/self, continue/pass, catch/except and they couldn’t find a different word for switch so they just didn’t implement it.
It’s as if the original designers purposefully wanted to be different for the sake of it.
pass and continue are absolutely not equal (pass is a noop, and python has a continue keyword that does what you think), and switch is called match like in many other languages. except is weird though.
“except” is also used in Pascal (or at least the main derivatives of it), but not sure if that’s older than its use in Python or not.
Python does have a
switchstatement now, actually. And yes, they went out of their way to call it something different -match.https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/controlflow.html#match-statements
matchisn’t just equivalent toswitchthough, so in this case it actually makes sense to call it something different.This is very true. Match statements are much more powerful that switch statements in any other language.
For instance:
- matching objects very specifically
- if conditions within case statements
- pulling variables from inside of the object directly.
I read that
selfas a keyword also has quite a history. It was already used in Smalltalk, an OOP language from the early 80’s.Isn’t self not actually a keyword? Like you can name the first variable in a class method anything and it will behave like self.
You could use “this” instead of “self”. And if you want a lynch mob of Python programmers outside your house, make a push request with that to some commonly used package.
I think there will be a lynch mob of git users outside your house for calling PR as “push request”.
I’ve been wondering about the noise.
Edit: turns out, they weren’t there to lynch me. They just gave me a two hour lecture on proper usage of git.
only github users. git itself doesn’t have PRs, and other forges call them different things. gitlab calls them merge requests, pico calls them patch requests…
You could even choose the name this.
PHP naming “::” a Paamayim Nekudotayim is also pretty infamous.
When I’m designing shit, I’m pretty zealous about borrowing terminology from anything even vaguely related to avoid this.
PHP weirdness and inconsintencies never fail to amaze me.
On the bright side, I found my first StackOverflow answer that would fit exactly the same on Linguistic Stack Exchange.
Absolutely cursed, lol.
So not only did they decide to randomly include Hebrew in their language, because I guess they were feeling kabbalistic, but they got the Hebrew wrong. In what way does any of that increase usability or even make them look competent?
It reminds me of the INTERCAL manual, which was a joke:
This precedence (or lack thereof) may be overruled by grouping expressions between pairs of sparks (’) or rabbit-ears (").
include Hebrew in their language, because I guess they were feeling kabbalistic
… or because the developers were Israeli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zend_(company)#History
Yeah, that’s not actually a good reason though, unless you’re developing a Hebrew programming language for Hebrew speakers. I made a bit of a joke about it, yes.
Iv come to loathe the “pythonic way” because of this. They claim they wanted to make programming easier, but they sure went out of their way to not follow conventions and make it difficult to relearn. For example, for me not having lambdas makes python even more complex to work with. List operations are incredibly easy with map and filter, but they decided lambdas weren’t “pythonic” and so we have these big cumbersome things instead with wildly different syntax.
Maybe I’m missing something, but:
- Python Lambda Functions - https://www.w3schools.com/python/python_lambda.asp
- Python map - https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python-map-function/
- They do have list comprehension, which let you basically one line a map operation more intuitively too.
So much Python criticism comes from people who don’t know the language.
I mean, there is a lot wrong with it, but every language has its quirks. Generally I like discussing it’s actual flaws cause it helps me better understand the language.
a lambdo which can only contain one expression, and not even a statement is pretty much useless. For anything nontrivial you have to write a separate function and have the lambda be just a function call expression. Which completely defeats the point
Speaking of big cumbersome things with wildly different syntax have you tried a ternary operation in python lately? Omg that thing is ugly. JavaScripts is hard to beat.
uglyTernary = True: if python_syntax == “shit” else: False prettyTernary = javascript_syntax == “pretty” ? true : false
That’s just because you’re used to it. The pythonic ternary is structured like spoken language, which makes it easier to read, especially if you nest them.
Is there an objective argument for the conventional ternary, other than „That’s how we’ve always done it!“?
I don’t read spoken language, but I do read written ones. The problem with python’s ternary is that it puts the condition in the middle, which means you have to visually parse the whole true:expression just to see where the condition starts. Which makes it hard to read for anything but the most trivial examples.
The same goes for comprehensions and generators
The conventional ternary is structured like a normal if-else. In fact, in many languages with functional influence, they’re the same thing.
For example, you can write this in Rust:
let vegetable = if 3 > 4 { "Potato" } else { "Tomato" };
If the conventions suck you have to break them. How else can you improve things?
map and filter are almost always inferior to generators and comprehension expressions in terms of readability. If you prefer the former, it’s just because you got used to it, not because it’s better.
Tf, who needs lambdas in python?
anyone using map, filter, reduce, or anything in itertools or functools?
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List and Array terminology also bothers me … Why not just call it an array?
But python lists are not like the base arrays in other languages. They function more like
List<>orvector(C++ had to be special) and are named appropriately.
List instead of array, dict instead on object (tho it also has objects)
In Python, self is not a keyword, it’s a conventional variable name. You can replace all instances of “self” with “this” and your code will work the same.
Lua might have been a better choice, since
selfis special in lua.Kinda.
Lua defines it implicitly only when you use the
function foo:bar(a, b, c) -- note the colonsyntactic sugar, which gets translated to
function foo.bar(self, a, b, c) -- note the periodIn all cases,
selfis a regular variable name. You can even redeclare a new local with that name even when the old one is in scope.Edit: some typos
I don’t see how what you said is inconsistent with me saying “self” is special in lua. Note that I did not say it’s a keyword.
Derp, I misread.
TBF the last two bullet points are verbose descriptions of the thing it means in C++, Java, and Python too. It’s just that in JS, “this” can also be used in other places.
But yeah, in practice, every time I write JS I want to throw my hands in the air and shout “this is bullshit”, but never know what “this” refers to… :D
Yeah that’s fair, though it also discusses that whole prototype thing that JS has going on
Sweet dreams are made of
thisI was working on a C code base with classes, inheritance, and polymorphism, all done by hands and macros.
Something like
typedef struct s_some_class { void (*method)(this *s_some_class); } t_some_class;Overall, learning C was the best enabler in my whole career. For instance I was learning Python by tinkering with CPython VM, so when I see these ‘WAT’ quircks I know exactly what’s up.
Interesting, how did they do inheritance? Something like
void *super? Also why not switch to CPP if you wanna do OOP?In general, ‘classes’ declarations were done with macro. I don’t remember the exact code — something akin to
BEGIN_CLASS(A, Parent); CLASS_MEMBER(a...) END_CLASS();The project had started before C++ existed, and the switch would be too costly. It’s not just OOP part, also reflection mechanism with bindings to the homemade scripting language, and multi-platform UI library. It was a gem of its time.
That sounds like quite a challenge to maintain, to speak in euphemisms ;)
Revolutionary technologies of the '80 make me appreciate modern programming languages and especially tooling much more.
Alternative image for C: Mr. Incredible: “A PARAMETER IS A PARAMETER!”
My JS:
Ah, you mean
that?In Python you can use this as a variable name
You can use anything that doesn’t start with a digit or punctuation as a variable name (underscore beginning also allowed) unless it’s a keyword.
_ (sic) as a variable name is often used when a function returns multiple outputs but you only want one
def my_function: return 1, 2, 3 _, two, _ = my_function()_can also be used in the python interactive terminal to mean ‘last return value’Ie:
> 'string' 'string' > a = _ > print(a) stringUnderscore alone is a special variable name and I’m pretty sure anything assigned to it goes straight to garbage collection. Whereas
_myvariableis typically used to indicate a “private” class variable or method (Python doesn’t have private so it’s just a convention).
The last bullet point is not really that common anymore.
Not much experience, but quickly learned .bind() in JS after it switched me to window instead of object.
The key is to not reassign function names to local variables.
const print = obj.toString print() // gives you a bad time
