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Before and after programming
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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Lmao, bruh. How do people keep praising a language where messing up a space breaks everything and there is no real type system?
Haha: "A space breaks everything." Fuck YES! Are you kidding me‽ It's one of the best features!
Why? Because it's so easy to see. In other languages you've got semicolons which are surprisingly difficult to notice when they're missing. Depending on the situation (or if you're just new to programming) you could spend a great deal of time troubleshooting your code only to find out that you're missing a semicolon. It's frustrating and it makes you feel stupid which is never a good thing for people who are new programming.
Types are in a different category altogether with seemingly infinite reasons why you'd want a feature-rich, low-level type system and also why you'd want to avoid that.
IMHO, the point of Python is to be a simple language that's quick to write yet also very powerful and speedy when you need it to be (by taking advantage of modules written in C or better, Rust). If it had a complex type system I think it would significantly lower the value of the language. Just like how when I see an entire code repo using Pydantic and type hints everywhere it makes the code unnecessarily complex (just use type hints where it matters 🙄).
I'm not saying using type hints on everything is a terrible thing... I just think it makes the code harder to read which, IMHO defeats the point of using Python and adds a TON of complexity to the language.
The promise of type hints is that they'll enable the interpreter to significantly speed up certain things and reduce memory utilization by orders of magnitude at some point in the future. When that happens I'll definitely be reevaluating the situation but right now there doesn't seem to be much point.
For reference, I've been coding in Python for about 18 years now and I've only ever encountered a bug (in production) that would've been prevented by type hints once. It was a long time ago, before I knew better and didn't write unit tests.
These days when I'm working on code that requires type hints (by policy; not actual necessity) it feels like doing situps. Like, do I really need to add a string type hint to a function called,
parse_log()? LOL!I don't mean this insultingly because lots of programming jobs don't require this and for the ones that do we still tend to all start here, but in all honesty this sounds like it's coming from someone who's never worked on a large project maintained by multiple people over time.
First of all, the hysteria over semicolons is ridiculous when JavaScript, Typescript, C#, Java, Go, Swift, etc. etc. wil all automatically highlight missing semicolons, if not automatically insert them for you when paired with an IDE and standard linter. On top of that, JavaScript and Typescript do not require semicolons at all, but they are still used alongside braces, because they make your code more scannable, readable, and moveable.
Secondly, without type safety your code is no longer predictable or maintainable. If you're working to quickly sketch out some new fangled logic for a research paper it's one thing, if you need to write test code so that your codebase can be tested an infinite number of times by other coders and whatever CI/ CD pipelines to make sure that nothing's broken, then all of the sudden you start seeing the value in strict typing.
Honestly, complaining about type safety adding "extra code" is a complaint that almost every coder has when they start out, before you eventually realize that all that "extra code" isn't just boiler plate for no reason but is adding specificity, predictability, reusability, and maintainability to your code base.
When defining types looked like this it was one thing:
String name = new String("Charles Xavier");But when it looks like this, there's no reason not to use strong typing:
const name = "Charles Xavier";This sounds like someone who's never worked on a large Python project with multiple developers. I've been doing this for almost two decades and we never encounter bugs because of mismatched types.
For reference, the most common bugs we encounter are related to exception handling. Either the code captured the exception and didn't do the right thing (whatever that is) in specific situations or it didn't capture the exception in the right place so it bubbles up waaaaay too high up the chain and we end up with super annoying troubleshooting where it's difficult to reproduce or difficult to track down.
Also, testing is completely orthogonal to types.
Have you worked on major projects in other languages in that time period to be able to compare and contrast?
The last two python projects I had to work on didn't have bugs because of type issues, but it was much harder to come into the codebase and understand what was going on given that you didn't have type information in many many places which forced you to go back and comb through the code instead.