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as someone who has written a lot of python but doesn't really work in the backend/services world, async itself felt like a huge mess to figure out when I was ex

as someone who has written a lot of python but doesn't really work in the backend/services world, async itself felt like a huge mess to figure out when I was exposed to it while mucking around in FastAPI internals to prove out an idea. This was mainly because of the infectious nature of async and the fact that the callback function I was passing up had to be synchronous while also calling async functions while the entire thing was running in an async loop. That meant I had to add a dependency just to call a damn function https://pypi.org/project/nest-asyncio/ https://pypi.org/project/nest-asyncio/. Rant over. `for await` and `async for` to me seem like a fairly natural extension once you understand async. I think the problem comes in where once you run into async the first time you are forced to fully grasp it (and potentially rewrite a ton of your code) to move forward which is really counter to the rest of the Python learning experience. [1] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...

option_greek 5y ago
The infectious nature is crazy. They also jump between boundaries of libraries and projects through dependencies. Thanks to async, most libraries in Rust now force addition of tokio which in turn convert more libraries into async. There should be some kind of compatibility layer that lets non async functions call async without jumping through hoops. As it stands async is more infectious than T-virus and Covid.
- knuthsat 5y ago
  The infectious nature is just how things work with types. Imagine if you had to annotate a function with IO every time you do something that reaches for something else outside of the program. You would either design things differently so that IO usage is minimized or you would make everything infected by IO. With Async, people are still figuring things out. I've encountered a bunch of code bases that are polluted with async when a better design could have removed it completely.
pharmakom 5y ago
I don’t really see how “infectious” a sync can be solved in a reasonable way. The function is async, can we really pretend it’s not? If it must be used in a sync context then it can be turned into a blocking call explicitly. This is not possible in JS so I can see the argument there, although they are now making the top level async too!

option_greek 5y ago

The infectious nature is crazy. They also jump between boundaries of libraries and projects through dependencies. Thanks to async, most libraries in Rust now force addition of tokio which in turn convert more libraries into async. There should be some kind of compatibility layer that lets non async functions call async without jumping through hoops. As it stands async is more infectious than T-virus and Covid.

knuthsat 5y ago
The infectious nature is just how things work with types. Imagine if you had to annotate a function with IO every time you do something that reaches for something else outside of the program. You would either design things differently so that IO usage is minimized or you would make everything infected by IO. With Async, people are still figuring things out. I've encountered a bunch of code bases that are polluted with async when a better design could have removed it completely.

pharmakom 5y ago

I don’t really see how “infectious” a sync can be solved in a reasonable way. The function is async, can we really pretend it’s not? If it must be used in a sync context then it can be turned into a blocking call explicitly. This is not possible in JS so I can see the argument there, although they are now making the top level async too!