On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Claudio Jeker <cjeker@diehard.n-r-g.com> wrote:
quoted text
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 02:51:32PM -0500, Nick Guenther wrote:
>> and just to add to the pyre...
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Claudio Jeker <cjeker@diehard.n-r-g.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Ugh, a programming language where you can't copy paste from xterm to xterm
>> > without fucking up the program is just way to much pain to work on.
>>
>>
>> >On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Ted Unangst <ted.unangst@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > for many people who are a little suspicious of the whole
>> > whitespace thing, when your first taste of the language is hours spent
>> > fixing the whitespace, you aren't inclined to use it any more than
>> > necessary.
>>
>> Your losses then. Python isn't so much a language of recipes, it's a
>> language of ideas.
>>
>
> Python is a bit like mother russia, it is thinking for you.
>
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Henning Brauer <lists-openbsd@bsws.de> wrote:
>> > * Floor Terra <floort@gmail.com> [2009-12-19 19:10]:
>> >>
>> >> In my experience (mostly python and c), code that has been pasted has
>> >> a higher bug density.
>> >>
>> >> It's worse with Python because of the indentation (tabs vs. spaces),
>> >> but as a general rule I would say never copy/paste code.
>> >
>> > boo hoo.
>> >
>> > there are very valid uses of copied code, or extremely similiar code
>> > (copy & paste and change a few things). we have that many times in the
>> > tree.
>>
>> Python is about thinking about what you're doing. It's one of those
>> languages that forces you to work on a higher level (not that there
>> aren't lots of places where python is used as a scripting
>> language--that code tends to come out badly, but that's because it's
>> written just to get the job done).
>>
>
> Yeah, we C-programmers are just mastrubating monkeys poking the typewrite
> till it produces compiling code. If you don't think about what your doing
> you get the crap code you see everywhere and it is not depending on the
> language used.
>
>> Ideal code is abstracted code, what possible use does repeating
>> yourself in the tree have? I know drivers have to declare a common set
>> of globals and make some macro calls and various entry-points are
>> found by sticking to a naming scheme, but that's trivia, hardly enough
>> to justify "valid uses for copied code". Anytime I find myself wanting
>> to copy some code it's always meant I've stumbled over an abstraction
>> I haven't made yet, so what in the world is src/ doing that -requires-
>> copied code?
>>
>
> Code abstraction is nice until you have to update a vendor driver or some
> other highly abstracted nightmare. Been there, done that, got the
> nightmares. Sometimes it is far better to copy a few lines instead of
> abstracting an interface until it is unusable.
>
> No programming language will redeem people from thinking and designing
> their projects correctly.

I should make it more clear what I was saying: knowing the basics of
python can't force you to write good code (in fact the python stdlib
is full of shitty shitty code--the web stuff is particularly terrible)
but there's something about working in it that lets me approach
problems in a different way then I would have otherwise.

(of course the near-ultimate end of this line of thinking is lisp,
where you can define syntax for any construct you want to abstract,
but lisp personally I find lisp too wordy--that's just me though)

And I didn't mean "abstracting" in the way that C++/Java people mean
it. I've fought tooth and nail against indirection in the name of
"simplification" before. Come on.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Darrin Chandler
<dwchandler@stilyagin.com> wrote:
quoted text
> Python is regularly used by myself and others for scripting and it
> comes out just fine. Sometimes I work at a higher level and other times
> not, as the situation calls for. Doing things The UNIX Way(tm) means
> some programs are simple filters that do not benefit from large numbers
> of abstraction layers. Far from forcing me, Python allows me to write in
> a way appropriate to the task at hand.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that scripting people wrote bad
code. I was thinking more like the add-ons to QuantumGIS.

quoted text
>> Your losses then. Python isn't so much a language of recipes, it's a
>> language of ideas.
>
> Oh my.
>
> A language of ideas should mean that ideas are concisely expressible in
> code, and that reading the code should convey the meaning. So you see an
> idea on the web somewhere and paste the idea into your code and it's
> broken? Idea fail!
>
> I like Python, but this "language of ideas" bit is silly.

Ideas as in the structure of the program, not as in "communication".
Yes you can write any data/dependency/etc structure in any language,
but some languages let you do it easier, and I've found python to be
the easiest that I've tried (which is, afterall, their stated goal).

quoted text
> Oh my.
>
> Python didn't invent abstraction. There's a lot of abstraction in the
> tree, you know, in plain old C. Some kinds of abstraction are easier in
> some languages, but there are often trade-offs. How many times per
> second does an ethernet driver get called when there's a lot of traffic?

Yeah yeah, I would trust that there's abstraction in the tree (more in
OpenBSD than most), but I didn't know why you wouldn't always try to
make the smallest code. I hadn't thought about execution time, it's
true, but even then I would think it's better to define a template and
fill in the blanks somehow instead of copy-pasting.

Anyway, enough /noise/, I can see that this is just going to end with
misunderstood words.

-Nick