enumerate improvement proposal

James Stroud jstroud at mbi.ucla.edu
Mon Oct 30 18:24:09 EST 2006


Diez B. Roggisch wrote:
>> Okay, I've googled "leaky abstractions" (as was probably your intended
>> affect with your silence), read the famous essay, and still
>> don't know what you mean and how it applies to what I have described.
>>
>> Do you plan to justify your statement or emptily accuse people of 
>> violating
>> esoteric principles?
> 
> 
> While I can't claim to know what the effbot thinks (the 
> skull-socks-wearing-python-coder-mindlink-technology is yet to be 
> developed), I think it's pretty clear what he is after here:
> 
> Computers compute offsets into data zero-based. Some languages like 
> pascal completely abstract that away from the user, but python doesn't.
> 
> So if your colleague/boss/whatever insists on indices being one-based, 
> this abstraction you introduced for her pretty fast leaks pretty badly. 
> Consider this simple example:
> 
> for offset, item in enumerate(some_list, start=1):
>     if item.is_the_chosen_one():
>         chosen_one_offset = offset
> 
> the_chosen_one = some_list[chosen_one_offset]
> 
> And bang, its Judas not Petrus who gets the pearly gates inc. stock 
> options.
> 
> Diez

Thank you for this explanation. Very illuminating. I think understand 
this idea well and the thought of 1 basing this function makes me cringe 
as much as the next guy (though I lacked the vocabulary to explain 
exactly why I cringe).

But you see, weaning this university faculty level economist (who 
already has her own way of doing everything...and to whom I happen to be 
married) from the traditional economics tools of gauss and sas towards 
the more sane and flexible tools of python, numarray, and rpy has been a 
multi-stage process. Tweaking the chosen abstractions to not be as leaky 
(thank you and thank Fredrik for introducing me to this vocabulary) is 
still one of the things I'm working towards. I want to solidify the 
conversion before I concentrate on nuance.

So, before too much criticism, I challenge even the most skilled python 
programmer to find his or her own faculty economist (or statistician or 
physicist) and get them to radically change their computational tools. 
When you've walked a mile in my shoes, leaky abstractions won't seem 
like such a big deal after all.

James

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/



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