> I happen to be teaching essential std lib modules this week, i had a headache with how naming goes on (i was looking at how a beginner would learn).   Poor me, what could be an intuitive learning journey has some clogs down the road.

To some degree, that's an inevitable part of the learning process. The most we can realistically do is try to be aware of it during design, but I suspect there's always going to be some "more intuitive" way we could have done it when looking back with hindsight.

On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 6:04 AM Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer <arj.python@gmail.com> wrote:
For the future, at least

I happen to be teaching essential std lib modules this week, i had a headache with how naming goes on (i was looking at how a beginner would learn).   Poor me, what could be an intuitive learning journey has some clogs down the road.

Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer
http://www.pythonmembers.club | https://github.com/Abdur-rahmaanJ
Mauritius

On Thu, 28 Nov 2019, 14:57 Steven D'Aprano, <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 02:06:08PM +0400, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer wrote:
> It's about ambiguity. Maybe loads is short for load string which in english
> is also a verb.

True. It took me a long time to stop getting confused between
pickle.load and .loads until I stopped reading it as "loads" and started
reading it as "load-s(tring)".

I agree with you that this is a sub-optimal naming convention, and we
would have been better if a different choice was made at the beginning.
But unfortunately it is a widely used naming convention:

    * pickle
    * marshall
    * json
    * yaml (I think)
    * and probably more

and not just in Python. But I agree with the others that the pain and
disruption from changing it is greater than the benefit. We all just
have to memorise that "loads" means "load-string" and not the present
tense of load.


--
Steven
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