Python is two languages now, and that's great

Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by mandevil on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:11AM (#34958066)

Not the writer, but based on what the author wrote, I think it's based on the author's experience with Java. It can be a hideous nightmare of java.util.Date versus java.sql.Date versus java.time.LocalDate (just to pick one very well known fiasco in the language- Java defenders please don't come after me) and all of them have to exist to avoid breaking things but you have to have different ways to handle each of them, so dealing at the boundaries between business logic and "infrastructure" is always a mess of converting types- oh this library is old enough that it needs a utilDate, so I need to convert it back down, then convert it back up at every boundary.

By contrast, duck-typing means that the intricacies of which exact type you are deserializing into is a lot less important in python.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by shellac on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:40AM (#34958529)

Might not be the best example since Python made quite a mess of dates and date times (in fairness, like most languages), and duck typing didn't help at all.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by mharig on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @07:20AM (#34981545)

No. The people make the mess. For persistence, only UTC without timezone makes sense. For UI, with few exceptions, only local time without time zone in ISO 8601 makes sense.

The only not so easy decision is: is it better to store as Unix epoch or as ISO string. That is a trade of between compactness and easy searching of date/time ranges.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by woeirua on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:27AM (#34958321)

> By contrast, duck-typing means that the intricacies of which exact type you are deserializing into is a lot less important in python.

How do you explain the popularity of type hinting in Python then? Type hinting arose _because_ duck typing is horrible for large systems.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by mandevil on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:30AM (#34958361)

Well, the article is the author's attempt to answer that question. I'm not sure that it's convincing to me, but then again I have a preference for strongly-typed languages so I'm probably not the correct audience. I'm just trying to help someone else understand the author's argument, as I understand it.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by paganel on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:56AM (#34958776)

Not the OP but I explain it as former Java/C# programmers coming to Python for one reason or another.

I’ve come to Python 20 years ago after a short stint with PHP and I don’t really care if the incoming stuff I have to handle is a list or a tuple (let’s say) as long as it quacks and walks like the proverbial duck.

More generally, you could say Python the original language is the victim of its own success (the same goes for JavaScript in relation to TypeSctipt).

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by jjoonathan on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:25AM (#34958282)

Duck Typing always struck me as utterly absurd wishful thinking. Two different types built for the same task will almost certainly not happen to be API compatible.

Am I missing something?

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by mandevil on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:33AM (#34958418)

I have bounced back and forth between typed and untyped languages in my two decades of employment history, and I prefer typed languages myself, even when I've been writing libraries nested deep in what I think the author would describe as the "infrastructure layer," but this is what I believe the original author of the linked piece is arguing.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by moron4hire on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:40AM (#34958527)

* * *

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by hobs on Monday February 27, 2023 @11:27AM (#34958314)

No, in my experience you are trading off ease of coding for order of magnitude more production bugs.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by mharig on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @07:09AM (#34981441)

So you do not write tests?

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by hobs on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @08:50AM (#35055273)

I absolutely do, and one of those effective tests is a simple type annotation.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by jcranmer on Monday February 27, 2023 @12:16PM (#34959070)

There are cases where it can be useful. One thing that comes to mind is numerical code, where your algorithms are generic over things that have *,/,+,-,==,!=, conversion from 0 or 1 [or some subset thereof] do the "right thing". Trying to define proper interface types for what constitutes the "right thing" is somewhat tedious without much relative gain.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by alanwreath on Monday February 27, 2023 @02:54PM (#34961054)

Its worked for us when dealing with local operations vs. cloud bucket operations. Protocols also help when you really don’t care to litter your code with some vendor specific object but instead just declare what functionality should be expected from the object passed in. It helps describe what you’re doing with it anyway, it’s why typing with Iterable can be helpful if you don’t care if it’s a list, set, or tuple.

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Re:Python is two languages now, and that's great by martinflack on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @12:27AM (#34965973)

In sequences, even just too calls like "more?" and "next" will let you entertain all kinds of strict and lazy possibilities.

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