Co-fecal humanism

It was a real dick move.

without type safety your code is no longer predictable or maintainable

This sounds like someone who’s never worked on a large Python project with multiple developers. I’ve been doing this for almost two decades and we never encounter bugs because of mismatched types.

For reference, the most common bugs we encounter are related to exception handling. Either the code captured the exception and didn’t do the right thing (whatever that is) in specific situations or it didn’t capture the exception in the right place so it bubbles up waaaaay too high up the chain and we end up with super annoying troubleshooting where it’s difficult to reproduce or difficult to track down.

Also, testing is completely orthogonal to types.

Yeah that’s annoying but it’s a short-term problem. Python just recently cleaned up some long-standing issues that broke backwards compatibility in packaging (for certain things). Most public modules that broke made trivial changes to fix the problems (once they learned about them) and life went on.

However, for some fucking reason a whole bunch of dependencies related to AI are dragging their feet and taking forever to fix their shit. Insisting that everyone “just use Python 3.10” and it drives me nuts too.

This problem started to become a real thing almost two years ago (so they had plenty of warning and time to fix things) and yet here we are with still a handful of core dependencies that won’t install for things like Stable Diffusion, Flux, and various LLM stuff because they’re dragging their feet.

I blame corporate culture: Enterprises hate upgrading their shit and they’re as slow as glaciers sometimes. There’s probably tooling at Nvidia, for example, that needs a ton of work for Torch to work with new versions of Python and since all their documentation already was written for running on Python 3.10 (and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) they’ve created a lot of work for themselves.

Any day now they’ll finally finish fixing all these little dependencies and then we’ll have another two years of ease before the problem rises again with Python 3.14 and it’s massive GIL-free improvements that require big changes in code to actually take advantage of them.

Why? The most annoying thing that I remember about it was popular modules that hadn’t been ported yet. In essence, a temporary problem; growing pains.

The Unicode/string/bytes changes were welcome (to me). But that might just be because I had actually encountered situations where I had to deal with seemingly endless complexity and ambiguity related to Unicode stuff and encodings. Python 3 made everything much more logical 🤷

Haha: “A space breaks everything.” Fuck YES! Are you kidding me‽ It’s one of the best features!

Why? Because it’s so easy to see. In other languages you’ve got semicolons which are surprisingly difficult to notice when they’re missing. Depending on the situation (or if you’re just new to programming) you could spend a great deal of time troubleshooting your code only to find out that you’re missing a semicolon. It’s frustrating and it makes you feel stupid which is never a good thing for people who are new programming.

Types are in a different category altogether with seemingly infinite reasons why you’d want a feature-rich, low-level type system and also why you’d want to avoid that.

IMHO, the point of Python is to be a simple language that’s quick to write yet also very powerful and speedy when you need it to be (by taking advantage of modules written in C or better, Rust). If it had a complex type system I think it would significantly lower the value of the language. Just like how when I see an entire code repo using Pydantic and type hints everywhere it makes the code unnecessarily complex (just use type hints where it matters 🙄).

I’m not saying using type hints on everything is a terrible thing… I just think it makes the code harder to read which, IMHO defeats the point of using Python and adds a TON of complexity to the language.

The promise of type hints is that they’ll enable the interpreter to significantly speed up certain things and reduce memory utilization by orders of magnitude at some point in the future. When that happens I’ll definitely be reevaluating the situation but right now there doesn’t seem to be much point.

For reference, I’ve been coding in Python for about 18 years now and I’ve only ever encountered a bug (in production) that would’ve been prevented by type hints once. It was a long time ago, before I knew better and didn’t write unit tests.

These days when I’m working on code that requires type hints (by policy; not actual necessity) it feels like doing situps. Like, do I really need to add a string type hint to a function called, parse_log()? LOL!

In the US we teach kids that trash men are suckers and idiots that didn’t work hard enough in school! Also, that trash is an externality: Someone else’s problem.

“We pay taxes for people to clean that up! Why should I spend my valuable time doing someone else’s job‽”

It’s an awful culture.

They get paid more than most people would think but it’s still not enough based on the hazards of the job. They get exposed to all sorts of nasty things that can ruin their long term health and they have increased likelihood that they’ll get a life-altering injury at work.

Historically, there were probably tens of thousands of people named, “Jesus” around that time. There were also loads and LOADS of people crucified by the Romans. If you were to make up a story and try to make it believable wouldn’t you pick a likely starting point?

Santa is a stand-in for Jesus… for children. They’re both magical beings that can perform miracles and have similar methods: Both Santa and Jesus have naughty lists and forms of punishment that come later; much later (both are equivalent lengths of time to a child though 🤣). Both bring “gifts”. Both have traditional appearances. Both have followers that wear silly hats and strange clothes. But most importantly…

Both are imaginary.

If you believe in Santa as an adult you’re ridiculed. If you believe in Jesus as an adult you’re just labeled, “Christian”. Yet the fact that nearly every child eventually finds out Santa isn’t real is quite disturbing to a lot of Christians. After all, if they could stop believing in Santa–who is so similar to Jesus in every way–then they could stop believing in Jesus.

Sounds sooooo second class to me. I only deal with first class languages so I can enjoy my curry with a satisfying closure 🎩 👌

OP doesn’t realize he’s an AI.

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What their next prompt will be.

The tortoise Doctor comes to visit from time to time.

Giant Sulcata Tortoise. Rescued from a highway in northern Florida. We adopter her at the (desperate) request of animal control.

The vet guessed she’s around 20 years old. She weighs about 100lbs right now (was only 85 when we took her in).

This is heaven for my tortoise. She loves pumpkins and we tell everyone in the neighborhood to bring all their old Halloween pumpkins to our place after they’re done with them.

Carved pumpkin getting a little wilty? She doesn’t care. Munch munch munch! Delicious.

Mechanical Keyboard Community:

“I need to see these $233 switches!” (Drools)