[Python-Dev] PEP 572: Write vs Read, Understand and Control Flow

[Chris Barker]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 2:21 AM, Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:

> Even if the C language allows assignments in if, I avoid them, because
> I regularly have to debug my own code in gdb ;-)
>

I personally haven't written a lot of C, so have no personal experience,
but if this is at all a common approach among experienced C developers, it
tells us a lot.

We shouldn't add a feature that people would make a point of avoiding!

OT note:


> Now the question is which Python are allowed for babies. I recall that
> a colleague was surprised and confused by context managers. Does it
> mean that try/finally should be preferred?


well, no, because try ... finally is even more confusing -- at least that's
the impression I get from spending 20 minutes on it with newbies in my
class last night :-)



>  Or metaclasses?


metaclasses are well known to be advanced juju -- they should not (and
probably don't) show up in everyday code. Even if they are used in everyday
code, the use is usually hidden -- i.e. when a user subclasses from an ORM
model class, they are using metaclasses, but they don't have to know that.

That is -- they fall into the category of stuff that should only be used by
library/framework developers -- and, in fact, the whole point is to make
everyday code easier.

In fact, the number of developers that need to write/debug metaclasses,
context managers, decorators, is far fewer than the number of folks that
USE those things. So the standards are very different.

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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