Hacker News Reader

Comment by deltaonefour | Hacker News Reader

I'm a python developer and within the last couple years I've encountered some interviews where they explicitly told me not to code in python.

Its because it's the language of choice for bad programmers who dont learn languages with any amount of depth. It's getting associated with mediocrity because it's so easy to pick up and low quality coders turn to it.

Your job solidifies this point. Literally, they need to hire someone to type annotate their code base because they don't know how? How low can you go?

View on HN

> the language of choice for bad programmers

Sure, and Java went through this phase too, and I'm sure so have plenty of other languages. It's the stage at which a language has reached mass adoption and it is inevitable, but it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the language.

The problem they face is that they need to chain function calls, and spend ages discovering that a given function returns speed in m/s, whereas the next one expects miles/hour as an input. That is just a small example of the issue they face (that could solved by other means than statically typing the Python code), they really want to make things more robust.

This sounds like they had people working on that code before, who had no clear picture of making a consistent interface, even if only by convention. Basically one should always default to standard SI units, or let the type system guarantee it, or in lack of such a system write comments explaining things, such as units and perhaps even give variables appropriate names indicating the unit. Another option would be using libraries, which take care of calculating with units and checking the units given.

Hope you can fix it. However, be prepared for other kinds of issues, which arise when there was not much discipline in writing the code.

who had no clear picture of making a consistent interface, even if only by convention.

There are few conventions that are consistent across domains. As a concrete example I worked on a code base where functions from some libraries wanted angles as radians and the others wanted them as degrees. Both where internally consistent and followed all the relevant conventions for their domain, however when they intersected it was a pain.

Just to open up the discussion, I am looking at the FMI [1] standard as a way to describe the interface of different block codes. And then try to generate the FMI description from static analysis of the Python function definitions.

That’s my current plan of study. But as I said earlier, I have some background in static typing in Java, and I might find the current state of the art in Python not to be adapted to my idea.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Mock-up_Interface

Something that seemed common in Erlang, but less so in Python, was to annotate numbers using tuples. If you used both radians and degrees in a single code base, they’d be passed around as named tuples.

> How low can you go?

php?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

On the more serious side, what you're describing about python I feel happened to PHP long ago. I wonder if Ruby is next. Hope not. I'm doing mostly Ruby these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com