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Well, but the cases he mentions are really not “just not being thoughtful”. I’m old enough to remember that Python 2 in fact had “print <string>”, and I think

Well, but the cases he mentions are really not “just not being thoughtful”. I’m old enough to remember that Python 2 in fact had “print <string>”, and I think also “exit”. Exactly because once upon a time Guido thought about what would feel nice to users. In time it turned out that special casing a handful of special functions introduces pain across everywhere else. Because of its valid syntax in REPL, it’s valid Python. So they removed the special casing for these functions, and added a helpful comment for people who might be confused. Ditto for wrapping comments in Rust. Doc strings in Rust can have doc-tests in them. Meaning that whatever comment wrapping you do must not break syntax there. I don’t know what feature exactly is needed there that’s currently nightly only, but I’m very sure it’s not just something trivial that nobody has gotten around to yet. Point being, no, everyone else except _me_ is not some dumb f*ck, who doesn’t do the obviously right thing because they hate me. Like, that _sometimes_ happens. But these are not those cases, and in my experience it actually happens pretty rarely. I think the default disposition towards seemingly stupid implementations or behaviors should be that people working on the implementation were not sloppy idiots who hate their users, but rather that they had their reasons, and me being put into their shoes would’ve likely done the same.

smsm42 3y ago
> So they removed the special casing for these functions, and added a helpful comment for people who might be confused. Technically correct. But: what happens is that when you start python, it outputs: Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. But when you type "license", you get this: Type license() to see the full license text Why that happens? Because "license" is a special object that has string representation as presented above and to actually read the license, you need to call it and not just request string representation. Technically it's all clean and correct. But guess what - the user does not care. Your design is not the user's problem, the usability is the user's problem. And the usability of this kind of solution is terrible. I know why it's done, I know how it's done, I can appreciate the technical beauty of it - and it still pisses me off. They clearly knew about this case, they themselves told me to use "license" and when I did it, they say "nah bro, you forgot the parens, you idiot, try again, har har har!" It's not a huge deal, but when it happens to you thousands of times, it eventually starts to piss you off. Avoiding this kind of thing is not easy - it may actually require departing from the nice and clean design you envisioned internally, and that may be annoying to a programmer - but as a user, I much prefer that this is how it would be done. I know there are reasons, in many cases I know exactly what the reasons are, because I've been guilty myself, but that doesn't help - the whole point is, as a user, it makes my life harder. So, in our development as a software engineers, once we learn how to build technically correct things, we also need to start thinking past that - how to build things that people would enjoy using.

smsm42 3y ago

> So they removed the special casing for these functions, and added a helpful comment for people who might be confused. Technically correct. But: what happens is that when you start python, it outputs: Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. But when you type "license", you get this: Type license() to see the full license text Why that happens? Because "license" is a special object that has string representation as presented above and to actually read the license, you need to call it and not just request string representation. Technically it's all clean and correct. But guess what - the user does not care. Your design is not the user's problem, the usability is the user's problem. And the usability of this kind of solution is terrible. I know why it's done, I know how it's done, I can appreciate the technical beauty of it - and it still pisses me off. They clearly knew about this case, they themselves told me to use "license" and when I did it, they say "nah bro, you forgot the parens, you idiot, try again, har har har!" It's not a huge deal, but when it happens to you thousands of times, it eventually starts to piss you off. Avoiding this kind of thing is not easy - it may actually require departing from the nice and clean design you envisioned internally, and that may be annoying to a programmer - but as a user, I much prefer that this is how it would be done. I know there are reasons, in many cases I know exactly what the reasons are, because I've been guilty myself, but that doesn't help - the whole point is, as a user, it makes my life harder. So, in our development as a software engineers, once we learn how to build technically correct things, we also need to start thinking past that - how to build things that people would enjoy using.