[Python-ideas] Working with Path objects: p-strings?

[Michel Desmoulin]

Le 27/03/2016 00:38, Greg Ewing a écrit :
> I'm wondering how often literal pathames are really used
> in actual programs.
> 
> In my experience, most pathnames are received as arguments,
> read from config files, etc. Most literals are just fragments
> that get concatenated with existing pathnames, and that's
> already covered by operations between path objects and strings.
> 

That's because you make big programs. I used to think that as well but
spending now half of my time as a trainer, I met many other ways to use
Python:

- financial analists: load recursively all those csv files in pandas for
me please.
- biologists : damn where did I put my data again ? ipython => numpy =>
ok not this one. Not this one. Not this one...
- geomaticians : hum, it's too slow, what if I reduce my layers to get
only bob shape files ? Let me write that again.
- sysadmins : ok let's move all those around, it's becoming a mess here.
I'll make real script later to prevent this for happening again.
- sunday scipters : oh, I'll reorganize my music today;
- students : I don't know what I'm doing, but I know I want to do it in
this dir.
- testers : what's the f***** ? let me fire a shell to explore this.

Python is not just used by programmers. It's used by 1000 people for
whom reconfigurability is a nice to have in the end, but first they want
to explore stuff manually and easily.

I've been spending a lot of time in docker containers lately, and
a switched a lot between python and bash because Python is still less
productive to use for files.

I can see myself in the shell using p'' to replace open, os and the
like. Just because it's faster, easier to remember, doesn't require
import and it one ".<tab>" away from giving me all I need to manipulate
the file. ipython and ptpython already provide completion on file paths.