To be fair, most developers I’ve worked with will have a meltdown if I try to start a conversation about Unicode.
E.g. if during a job interview the interviewer asks you to check if a string is a palindrome, try explaining why that isn’t technically possible in Python (at least during an interview) without using a third-party library.
I'm actually vaguely surprised that Python doesn't have extended-grapheme-cluster segmentation as part of its included batteries.
Every other language I tend to work with these days either bakes support for UAX29 support directly into its stdlib (Ruby, Elixir, Java, JS, ObjC/Swift) or provides it in its "extended first-party" stdlib (e.g. Golang with golang.org/x/text).
You're more likely to impress the interviewer by asking questions like "should I assume the input is only ASCII characters or the complete possible UTF-8 character set?"
A job interview is there to prove you can do the job, not prove your knowledge and intellect. It's valuable to know the intricacies of Python and strings for sure, but it's mostly irrellevant for a job interview or the job itself (unless the job involves heavy UTF-8 shenanigans, but those are very rare)
(Same goes for Go, it turns out, as I discovered this morning.)
function is_palindrome(string $str): bool {
return $str === implode('', array_reverse(grapheme_str_split($str)));
}
$palindrome = 'satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas';
$polar_bear = "\u{1f43b}\u{200d}\u{2744}\u{fe0f}";
$palindrome = str_replace($palindrome, 'y', $polar_bear);
is_palindrome($palindrome);Cause if you are intentionally obtuse, it is not meltdown to conclude you are intentionally obtuse.
If you mean "parse" then it's probably annoying, as all parser generators are, because they're bad at error messages when something has invalid syntax.
Practically, yes
Why are we being "fair" to a machine? It's not a person.
We don't say, "Well, to be fair, most people I know couldn't hammer that nail with their hands, either."
An LLM is a machine, and a tool. Let's not make excuses for it.
We aren't, that turn of phrase is only being used to set up a joke about developers and about Unicode.
It's actually a pretty popular form these days:
a does something patently unreasonable, so you say "To be fair to a, b is also patently unreasonable thing under specific detail of the circumstances that is clearly not the only/primary reason a was unreasonable."