[Python-ideas] Documenting Python warts on Stack Overflow

[Chris Rebert]

> On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 7:10 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I am thinking about [python-wart] on SO. There is no currently a list of
>> Python warts, and building a better language is impossible without a clear
>> visibility of warts in current implementations.
>>
>> Why Roundup doesn't work ATM.
>> - warts are lost among other "won't fix" and "works for me" issues
>> - no way to edit description to make it more clear
>> - no voting/stars to percieve how important is this issue
>> - no comment/noise filtering
>> and the most valuable
>> - there is no query to list warts sorted by popularity to explore other
>> time-consuming areas of Python you are not aware of, but which can popup one
>> day
>>
>> SO at least allows:
>> + voting
>> + community wiki edits
>> + useful comment upvoting
>> + sorted lists
>> + user editable tags (adding new warts is easy)
>>
>> This post is a result of facing with numerous locals/settrace/exec issues
>> that are closed on tracker. I also have my own list of other issues
>> (logging/subprocess) at GC project, which I might be unable to maintain in
>> future. There is also some undocumented stuff (subprocess deadlocks) that
>> I'm investigating, but don't have time for a write-up. So I'd rather move
>> this somewhere where it could be updated.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 11:31 PM, Jasper St. Pierre
<jstpierre at mecheye.net> wrote:
> We already have a collection of "warts" or "gotchas":
>
> http://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-must-dictionary-keys-be-immutable
> http://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-doesn-t-list-sort-return-the-sorted-list
> http://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-are-default-values-shared-between-objects
> http://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-can-t-raw-strings-r-strings-end-with-a-backslash
>
> and so on. Note that that document is probably extremely out of date, but
> there is an existing place for them.

When much older Python 2.x-s were still in their heyday, there were
some popular 3rd-party lists:
http://lwn.net/Articles/43059/
http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/python_pitfalls.html
http://www.ferg.org/projects/python_gotchas.html

(FWICT, Andrew Kuchling's article led to the "warts" terminology.)

Cheers,
Chris