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Wholly agreed about not writing Java in Python, and I do write idiomatic Python. The problem is that I don't know what methods the returned objects have availab

Wholly agreed about not writing Java in Python, and I do write idiomatic Python. The problem is that I don't know what methods the returned objects have available, and as such whether they are a duck or a tiger. The examples show that it has a mouth and eyes, but I need to know whether it has wings or claws, and Python's docs don't make that clear. Can I index the returned object, or only iterate over it? Is it mutable? Is it a dict or a tuple of (key,value) tuples? Did the author think it was worth it to make its own class for the return type, because they want the indexes where the value was found as well as the metadata? Python, to a degree, brushes over these problems by being able to print out most types of data and then figure out where the problem is, but TBH I'd prefer to write the correct code to begin with, and the docs don't give me enough information to do so. As such, Python turns into a dodge-the-error-driven-programming, and I feel much less productive than I could be. Yes, duck-typing gets you part of the way, but it doesn't let you pretend type doesn't exist entirely. I feel like using Go's interfaces would be more powerful for a duck-typing language than having type-annotations.

lqdc13 10y ago
"The problem is that I don't know what methods the returned objects have available, and as such whether they are a duck or a tiger." I don't get this... Why not do the following: In [1]: import requests In [2]: resp = requests.get('http://www.google.com') In [3]: resp. resp.apparent_encoding resp.iter_lines resp.close resp.json resp.connection resp.links resp.content resp.ok resp.cookies resp.raise_for_status resp.elapsed resp.raw resp.encoding resp.reason resp.headers resp.request resp.history resp.status_code resp.is_permanent_redirect resp.text resp.is_redirect resp.url resp.iter_content Now you can try each of those things and explore their methods.
- natch 10y ago
  >>> import requests Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> ImportError: No module named 'requests' Now, what was your question?
- snovv_crash 10y ago
  Because I'm not always scripting - sometimes the work I'm doing takes 10 minutes of runtime to get to the end and I want to know what I'm writing before I run it. If Python wants to remain a scripting language forever then the docs are sufficient. But if it wants to graduate, and it seems a lot of people think it already has, then the libraries need to be better documented.
d0mine 10y ago
If you don't know whether a method returns an iterator or a mutable/immutable sequence (regardless of the specific type) then the documentation is incomplete (it is a bug). If it is in stdlib; you could submit a documentation patch for a *.rst file on https://bugs.python.org/ https://bugs.python.org/ See https://docs.python.org/devguide/docquality.html https://docs.python.org/devguide/docquality.html

lqdc13 10y ago

"The problem is that I don't know what methods the returned objects have available, and as such whether they are a duck or a tiger." I don't get this... Why not do the following: In [1]: import requests In [2]: resp = requests.get('http://www.google.com') In [3]: resp. resp.apparent_encoding resp.iter_lines resp.close resp.json resp.connection resp.links resp.content resp.ok resp.cookies resp.raise_for_status resp.elapsed resp.raw resp.encoding resp.reason resp.headers resp.request resp.history resp.status_code resp.is_permanent_redirect resp.text resp.is_redirect resp.url resp.iter_content Now you can try each of those things and explore their methods.

natch 10y ago
>>> import requests Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> ImportError: No module named 'requests' Now, what was your question?
snovv_crash 10y ago
Because I'm not always scripting - sometimes the work I'm doing takes 10 minutes of runtime to get to the end and I want to know what I'm writing before I run it. If Python wants to remain a scripting language forever then the docs are sufficient. But if it wants to graduate, and it seems a lot of people think it already has, then the libraries need to be better documented.

d0mine 10y ago

If you don't know whether a method returns an iterator or a mutable/immutable sequence (regardless of the specific type) then the documentation is incomplete (it is a bug). If it is in stdlib; you could submit a documentation patch for a *.rst file on https://bugs.python.org/ https://bugs.python.org/ See https://docs.python.org/devguide/docquality.html https://docs.python.org/devguide/docquality.html