3 ms·

Strongly agreed! This convention has even infected internal tooling at my company. Scripts end up with tons of cryptic three letter names. It saves a couple key

Strongly agreed! This convention has even infected internal tooling at my company. Scripts end up with tons of cryptic three letter names. It saves a couple keystrokes but wastes engineering time to maintain

physicsguy 2y ago
The convention is a convention because the libraries are used so commonly. If you give anyone in scientific computing Python world something with “np” or “pd” then they know what that is. Doing something other than what is convention for those libraries wastes more time when people jump into a file because people have to work out now whether “array” is some bespoke type or the NumPy one they’re used to.
- paulluuk 2y ago
  There is no way that "warp" is already such a household name that it's common enough to shorten it to "wp". Likewise, the libraries at OP's company are for sure not going to be common to anyone starting out at the company, and might still be confusing to anyone who has worked there for years but just hasn't had to use that specific library. Pandas and Numpy are popular, sure. As is Tensorflow (often shortened to tf). But where do you draw the line, then? should the openai library be imported as oa? should flask be imported as fk? should requests be imported as rq? It seems to happen mostly to libraries that are commonly used by one specific audience: scientists who are forced to use a programming language, and who think that 1-letter variables are good variable names, and who prefer using notebooks over scripts with functions. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Python gets so much attention from the scientific community, but I feel that small little annoyances like this creep in because of it, too.
hot_gril 2y ago
It doesn't really matter
- m463 2y ago
  import os as o import sys as s
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Those are already short enough, but if someone really wants to rename os to o, I won't mind.

physicsguy 2y ago

The convention is a convention because the libraries are used so commonly. If you give anyone in scientific computing Python world something with “np” or “pd” then they know what that is. Doing something other than what is convention for those libraries wastes more time when people jump into a file because people have to work out now whether “array” is some bespoke type or the NumPy one they’re used to.

paulluuk 2y ago
There is no way that "warp" is already such a household name that it's common enough to shorten it to "wp". Likewise, the libraries at OP's company are for sure not going to be common to anyone starting out at the company, and might still be confusing to anyone who has worked there for years but just hasn't had to use that specific library. Pandas and Numpy are popular, sure. As is Tensorflow (often shortened to tf). But where do you draw the line, then? should the openai library be imported as oa? should flask be imported as fk? should requests be imported as rq? It seems to happen mostly to libraries that are commonly used by one specific audience: scientists who are forced to use a programming language, and who think that 1-letter variables are good variable names, and who prefer using notebooks over scripts with functions. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Python gets so much attention from the scientific community, but I feel that small little annoyances like this creep in because of it, too.

hot_gril 2y ago

It doesn't really matter

m463 2y ago
import os as o import sys as s
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Those are already short enough, but if someone really wants to rename os to o, I won't mind.