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Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

I found the opposite. For example, I find it extraordinarily frustrating not to be able to know what kind of object something is by looking at the point in code where it is created; something like

variable = somefunction(inputParameter)

where variable did not exist before leaves me having to look up the documentation of somefunction to know what kind of object it is returning.

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Documentation? We don't need no stinking documentation!

Try this variant:

    variable = somefunction(inputParameter)
    # the next line is a temporary debug statement
    print "variable has the following attributes:", dir(variable)

Or this one:

    variable = somefunction(inputParameter)
    help(variable)      # temporary debugging statement

Or this one:

    help(somefunction)

Or even this:

    variable = somefunction(inputParameter)
    print "the type is", type(variable)      # temporary debugging statement

A lot of API's use built-in objects, so quite often you don't even need anything more complicated than:

    variable = somefunction(inputParameter)
    print "variable is", variable

Using a Python-aware IDE like Eclipse PyDev might help too, but it's been a while since I've personally used it so I can't say off the top of my head what feature you want. Honestly, Python is so easy to use, you don't really need an IDE at all (of course this is just my opinion on something that's purely a matter of personal taste).

Hopefully, whoever defined somefunction did something like this:

  def somefunction(inputParameter):
      '''
      inputParameter: List of seven positive integers
      representing a poker hand
      Returns: A positive integer used to score that hand
      relative to all other possible hands, better hands
      receive higher scores.
      '''

You know they didn't. These are programmers we're talking about :)

Well, you'll hate it, but even after you discover what is the class of your object, you'll still have no idea what methods it implements, and what attributes it has. In Python any of that can (and do) change.

Sometimes that is frustating. I suffered a lot until I understood the Django's forms API. But this feature is worth the cost.

The secret is not to care and just hack away.

That does explain a great deal of the code and programmes I have encountered over the last decade :)

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