[Python-ideas] PEP 8 update on line length

[Abe Dillon]

[Chris Angelico]

> Not about HOW it works. That's irrelevant. You DO need to know about
> what it does, which is what I said.


So it is. I'm sorry I misread your comment.

[Chris Angelico]

> In the case of random.choice, that's very clearly defined by its
> documentation: it chooses a random
> element from the thing you give it. If you don't know that, you have to
> look it up to determine whether

that's the problem.


I think you're missing the point. The name random.choice alone, doesn't
fully describe its interface,
yet the first time I came across it in code, I didn't feel the need to go
look into documentation. I'm betting you
could make a pretty good educated guess of the interface of all the
functions in the code I wrote above.

Humans aren't computers. We can and do deal with ambiguity all the time. We
can usually make a pretty
good guess whether we need to drill down into a function to find a bug even
if we don't know EVERYTHING
about what the function does. Sometimes that educated guess is wrong and we
have to back up and look
at things we initially thought were irrelevant, but we're not as brittle to
ambiguity as you seem to think.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 7:35 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 12:26 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You don't need to know EVERYTHING about how block_fork works to debug
> that failure. You
> > probably don't need to know EVERYTHING about how random.choice works
> either. You don't
> > need to know about how most of the functions in the code work. The code
> is not blocking an
> > opponent's win. The fault must be in "win" or "opposite".
>
> Not about HOW it works. That's irrelevant. You DO need to know about
> what it does, which is what I said. In the case of random.choice,
> that's very clearly defined by its documentation: it chooses a random
> element from the thing you give it. If you don't know that, you have
> to look it up to determine whether that's the problem.
>
> ChrisA
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