• Bobo The Great
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • lime!
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      612 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        112 months ago

        “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.

    • Scrubbles
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      132 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 months ago

        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

        • @[email protected]
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          22 months ago

          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!“?

          • Ephera
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            12 months ago

            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" };
            
          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            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 if-block 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

          • @[email protected]
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            52 months ago

            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.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 months ago

          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

        • Natanox
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          2 months ago

          And switch cases (called match cases) are there as well.

          I use lambdas all the time to shovel GTK signal emitions from worker threads into GLib.idle_add in a single line, works as you’d expect.

          Previous commenters probably didn’t look at Python in a really long time.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        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.

    • SolNine
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      32 months ago

      List and Array terminology also bothers me … Why not just call it an array?

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        But python lists are not like the base arrays in other languages. They function more like List<> or vector (C++ had to be special) and are named appropriately.

        • SolNine
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          12 months ago

          Ahh thank you for that information! In all seriousness, I appreciate you correcting my ignorance.

    • @[email protected]
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      152 months ago

      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.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          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 (").

      • @[email protected]
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        112 months ago

        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.

        • Diplomjodler
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          142 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            132 months ago

            I think there will be a lynch mob of git users outside your house for calling PR as “push request”.

            • lime!
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              82 months ago

              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…

            • Diplomjodler
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              2 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                2 months ago

                TECHNICALLY, there is no such thing as a pull request in git. That’s a Github convention. It’s really a merge request

                e: drat someone already out-pedantic’d me

      • @[email protected]
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        112 months ago

        match isn’t just equivalent to switch though, so in this case it actually makes sense to call it something different.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 months ago

          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.