[Python-ideas] Why is design-by-contracts not widely adopted?

[David Mertz]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 4:38 AM Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Sep 2018 at 02:24, Marko Ristin-Kaufmann <
> marko.ristin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I annotated pathlib with contracts:
>> https://github.com/mristin/icontract-pathlib-poc. I zipped the HTML docs
>> into
>> https://github.com/mristin/icontract-pathlib-poc/blob/master/contracts-pathlib-poc.zip,
>> you can just unpack and view the index.html.
>>
>
> The thing that you didn't discuss in the above was the effect on the
> source code. Looking at your modified sources, I found it *significantly*
> harder to read your annotated version than the original. Basically every
> function and class was cluttered with irrelevant[1] conditions, which
> obscured the logic and the basic meaning of the code.
>

My reaction was just the same as Paul's. I read the modified source, and
found that the invariant declarations made it *dramatically* harder to
read. The ratio was almost exactly as I characterized in a recent note: 15
lines of pre/post-conditions on a 10 like function.

Like Paul, I understand the documentation and testing value of these, but
they were highly disruptive to the readability of the functions themselves.

As a result of reading the example, I'd be somewhat less likely to use a
DbC library, and much more strongly opposed to having one in the standards
library (and aghast at the idea of dedicated syntax)
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