Re:Pattern matching accepted for Python
by breuleux on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @12:05PM
(#26091822)
> Oops, I've accidentally written 'position.absolute' instead of 'neighbour.absolute'!
I'm going to be honest here, the number of times I've made that kind of mistake is absolutely dwarfed by the number of times I have used the wrong variable because I had accidentally shadowed it.
Neither mistake is super common, but I can't recall ever writing 'position.absolute' instead of 'neighbour.absolute' unless I legitimately needed both position and neighbour in scope and the problem was hard to reason about. I can recall accidentally reusing a variable like 'x' as an iteration variable and then using the wrong 'x' because I forgot, and I can also recall misunderstanding what some piece of code did because I thought 'x' was referring to the outer scope but I had missed that it was shadowed by another declaration. Shadowing has caused me many more problems than it solved, at least in my own experience.
I'm going to be honest here, the number of times I've made that kind of mistake is absolutely dwarfed by the number of times I have used the wrong variable because I had accidentally shadowed it.
Neither mistake is super common, but I can't recall ever writing 'position.absolute' instead of 'neighbour.absolute' unless I legitimately needed both position and neighbour in scope and the problem was hard to reason about. I can recall accidentally reusing a variable like 'x' as an iteration variable and then using the wrong 'x' because I forgot, and I can also recall misunderstanding what some piece of code did because I thought 'x' was referring to the outer scope but I had missed that it was shadowed by another declaration. Shadowing has caused me many more problems than it solved, at least in my own experience.