On 8 September 2016 at 12:47, Danilo J. S. Bellini <danilo.bellini@gmail.com> wrote:
Though I agree with the argument that inexperienced developers are [usually] worse, that's not the case here, unless anyone here is really trying to say the ones arguing for or against "shuffled" are inexperienced. These ad hominem won't bring us anywhere.
No one seem to be arguing if "shuffled" is inconsistent, but the "shuffle" consistency is a subject that didn't reach consensus. And the point now seem to be whether "shuffled" is useful or not. If I understood correctly, that proposal is about writing code in a more functional style (or a expression-oriented programming style), with a pure function for shuffling.
A pure function for shuffling already exists - random.sample() So the question at hand boils down to whether it makes sense to provide: def shuffled(self, container): return self.sample(container, len(container)) as a method on Random objects, and equivalently as a top-level module function. I'd personally be in favour of that as a learning bridge between shuffling and sampling (shuffle in place -> shuffle out of place -> sample a subset rather than shuffling out of place and slicing), but I'm neither a professional educator nor a maintainer or heavy user of the module in question, so my preference in the matter should be weighted pretty low.
I think there are other related subjects that can be said about sorted/shuffled. For example: why a list? Why not a generator?
This is covered in the random.sample() docs - returning a list is useful, as you can then easily use slices and tuple unpacking to partition the result: winners = random.sample(participants, 10) first, second, *runners_up = winners Beyond that practical benefit, if you want random-sampling-with-replacement, then "map(random.choice, container)" already has you covered, while random-sampling-without-replacement inherently needs to maintain a set of already produced values so it can avoid repeating them, which makes the apparent memory efficiency of using a generator instead is somewhat illusory.
Something like random.choice is useful to get one single value, but if one just want to see a few random values from a large input without repeating the values, what's the best approach?
Use random.sample(), that's what it's for. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia