5 ms·

> unlike Java it will not complain that it has no idea how to "lower" 3. AttributeError is a complaint, isn't it?

drostie 15y ago
I thought you were arguing against the magic of Python. :P The point I'm making is I suppose one about personal mental hygiene, but I am choosing an odd language for it. Because I am talking about how computers can reason for us, and can help us reason. Python will not complain about x.lower() until it actually occurs; it doesn't reason at all about x. On the other hand, the Python interpreter gives you some leeway to sit inside the code as it's being run, to say "okay, what can I do with x now that I have it?" -- which is a start. It's especially pivotal for me when I'm working with an external software package which isn't well-documented. I hate working with someone else's packages in Lisp. With Python, I can usually reverse-engineer what they were thinking pretty easily. With Java, your code editor provides another method to do the same thing, preventing you from writing things which wouldn't have made sense to the package designers -- this helps you know what does make sense, to help you understand what they were thinking. Like I said, my broader point is about mental hygiene, and there is a missing connection between mental hygiene and what computers can do for me. I think this is best summarized by Minsky and Sussman's reminder: "programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily formulated ideas." That's the missing connection. When I have a function which I don't completely understand, assigning it to a namespace helps me to be formal and precise about the situations where it is useful, and allows me to reason about the situations where it is not useful. So for all that it might pride me that I can just look up the array API on developer.mozilla.org and quickly learn the difference between "shift", "splice", and "unshift", that's not as important to me. It's something more poignant that interests me, something about how, when I have a string, my brain quickly reasons about what functions are correct for it. I don't know how much Hungarian notation you've worked with, but the property-based notation has some Hungarian quirk to it where you can just feel that you've got the right sort of expression.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Exceptions are magic?
  - drostie 15y ago
    What?

I thought you were arguing against the magic of Python. :P The point I'm making is I suppose one about personal mental hygiene, but I am choosing an odd language for it. Because I am talking about how computers can reason for us, and can help us reason. Python will not complain about x.lower() until it actually occurs; it doesn't reason at all about x. On the other hand, the Python interpreter gives you some leeway to sit inside the code as it's being run, to say "okay, what can I do with x now that I have it?" -- which is a start. It's especially pivotal for me when I'm working with an external software package which isn't well-documented. I hate working with someone else's packages in Lisp. With Python, I can usually reverse-engineer what they were thinking pretty easily. With Java, your code editor provides another method to do the same thing, preventing you from writing things which wouldn't have made sense to the package designers -- this helps you know what does make sense, to help you understand what they were thinking. Like I said, my broader point is about mental hygiene, and there is a missing connection between mental hygiene and what computers can do for me. I think this is best summarized by Minsky and Sussman's reminder: "programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily formulated ideas." That's the missing connection. When I have a function which I don't completely understand, assigning it to a namespace helps me to be formal and precise about the situations where it is useful, and allows me to reason about the situations where it is not useful. So for all that it might pride me that I can just look up the array API on developer.mozilla.org and quickly learn the difference between "shift", "splice", and "unshift", that's not as important to me. It's something more poignant that interests me, something about how, when I have a string, my brain quickly reasons about what functions are correct for it. I don't know how much Hungarian notation you've worked with, but the property-based notation has some Hungarian quirk to it where you can just feel that you've got the right sort of expression.

mattdeboard 15y ago
Exceptions are magic?
- drostie 15y ago
  What?