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Comment by dhatch387 | Hacker News Reader

A programming language "is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any single-taped Turing machine" [1]. This author doesn't seem to understand this concept properly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

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And if he doesn't understand that concept should he _really_ be teaching anyone programming?

I'm pretty sure that if you understand both Turing completeness and the practice of actual programming, then you know that in most cases the one has virtually nothing to do with the other. (Which is not meant at all to imply that the author of linked article understands Turing completeness, just that even though he doesn't seem to he could still be excellent at teaching programming.)

Then the question becomes "why is he talking about turing completeness, something that is either irrelevant, or that he knows nothing about?"

I mean it sounds very nice and fancy - but loop semantics and conditional jumps have nearly nothing to do with what he's talking about.

Heck no he shouldn't.

I'm pretty sure this was a tongue-in-cheek way of stating the true criticism.

I'm wondering that here. The whole article feels over-the-top, perhaps it's a well crafted parody, an extreme sense of sarcasm? May be he is a Python 3 lover after all.

Isn't over-the-top Zed Shaw's "thing"?

Ditto.

Then I read more for laughs.

I kind of feel like I could fix py2to3 if I have a sed and awk layer in there.. maybe a fun project.

In my experience a lot of the problems with automatically converting existing Python 2 code to Python 3 code is that the Python 2 code usually makes fundamentally broken assumptions when it comes to unicode and bytes.

This is what the author doesn't get- the fact that Python 2 makes no distinction between bytes-like objects and string-like objects is a bug, not a feature. He finds his code so awful to migrate because he has built it on a contrary assumption.

lol, winning.

I was working on a side project and ended up upgrading because I could figure out how Python was encoding my data. I got so frustrated with the semantics I found it easier to jusy upgrade.

Definitely disagree. I am a literal genius, wrote compilers, learned a dozen programming languages for fun, but prefer to do hard things. Yes p2 handling of coding is broken, but p3 is much worse. Making a theoretical argument about a pragmatic problem is a category mistake. And it's not even the core of Zed's expressed concern, which is the arrogant and abusive manipulation of the user community in service of the interests of self-obsessed project.

such smart. impressed. "p2" "p3". knows unique terminology. literal genius. so smart. A dozen programming languages just for fun? You definitely know what you're talking about and have very worthwhile contributions. People should listen to you.

I like what you said about self-obsessed project. It's clear that you have a very well reasoned position, not just opinion. What you say makes irrefutable sense.

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