On 1 December 2017 at 13:40, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
I genuinely don't think these kinds of operators are all that useful outside the specific domain of working with semi-structured hierarchical data stored in graph databases and document stores like MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and PostgreSQL JSONB columns, or else piping data between such stores and JSON consuming clients.
In that case, surely there are 3rd party libraries that help with extracting such data from raw objects? Or if not, how seriously has anyone looked at developing one? With the ability to create specialised getattr and getitem behaviour, is it really so difficult to produce a class that allows users to extract hierarchical data? I know it probably couldn't do as good a job as if there were dedicated syntax, but as a basis for a proposal that said "current best practice (using module XXX) looks like this, but would be improved with the following language support" it would help to ground the discussion in real use cases. In the context of comparisons with matrix multiplication, PEP 465 put a lot of time into explaining how all the ways of approaching the problem short of a language change had been tried and found wanting. Maybe PEP 505 should be held to a similar standard? At the moment, 99% of the discussion seems rooted in generalised "it would help a lot of code" with readability arguments based on artificial examples, and that's not really helping move the discussion forward. To be clear, I understand the problem of reading semi-structured data. I've hit it myself and been frustrated by it. But my reaction was "why am I not able to find a library that does this?", and when I couldn't find such a library, my assumption was that people in general don't find the current behaviour sufficiently frustrating to do anything about it. And I was in the same situation - it annoys me, but not enough to write a helper module (and certainly not enough that I'm crying out for a language change). So I do appreciate the need, I just don't think "language change" should be the first thing that's suggested. Paul PS Some of the above may have been covered in the PEPs and previous discussions. I haven't reread them - but any serious reboot of the discussion should probably start with a summary of where we're up to.