Maybe, there's a misunderstanding here and I hope I didn't waste too much of your and my time.

Not sure where I got this from but my last status was that Arek would like to have a "shuffled" function that does exactly what you described. Maybe, that doesn't fit the reports description but his pull request will tell the truth. :)


About the confusion of returning None. It's not confusing in the sense of "o my god, I did it wrong, I need to learn it", but more, like "I used shuffle, BECAUSE it's the only one I could find in a hurry" and then ascertain "why the heck is there no alternative returning the shuffled result instead of overwriting my list? I would expect this from Python as it already provides both alternatives for sorting".


Sven

On 08.09.2016 00:02, Tim Peters wrote:

[Sven R. Kunze <srkunze@mail.de>]

I am not questioning experience which everyone in a team can benefit from.


BUT experienced devs also need to recognize and respect the fact that
younger/unexperienced developers are just better in detecting
inconsistencies and bloody work-arounds. They simply haven't had to live
with them for so long. Experienced devs just are stuck in a rut/are
routine-blinded: "we've done that for years", "there's no better way".


That's the way we do it in our teams. Employing the new guys as some sort of
inconsistency detectors. This way, they learn to find their way around the
code base and they can improve it by doing so.

And I would never allow it in my team, to dismiss this kind of observation
from new colleagues. It's invaluable as they will become routine-blinded as
well.

I have been more than willing to discuss it, and I did not close the
issue report.  I did say I was opposed to it, but that's simply
because I am, and I explained there too _why_ I was opposed.

Do you have anything to say about the specific proposal?  I doubt
either of us has found this meta-discussion useful.  I'm still looking
for a compelling use case.  The only concrete thing anyone has noted
in `shuffled()`'s favor so far is that sometimes they're surprised by
the behavior of random.shuffle(list) returning None in an interactive
shell (noted by you, and by another, and I cheerfully own up to being
a bit surprised by that too long ago).   But that's an observation
about `random.shuffle()`, not about the proposed `shuffled()`.

[...] I would be far more annoyed if, e.g.,

random.shuffle(some_million_element_list)

  swamped my terminal with mountains of output.

But you readily accept this behavior for "sorted"? That makes no sense at
all.

Of course it does.  The only analogy to random.shuffle(big_list)
returning None that makes a lick of sense here is that big_list.sort()
also returns None.  IF a `shuffled()` function is introduced, then of
course it should return its result - just like `sorted()` returns its
result.

You can't both behaviors simultaneously, so the status quo wins.
Indeed, the venerable status quo ;-)

Nobody said to change "shuffle".

A verbatim quote from the first message in this thread:

     "Also shuffle() should return self so mutating methods could be chained."

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