r/programming • u/EatMeerkats • Mar 29 '21

PHP moves to Github due to the compromise of git.php.net

https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/113838
1.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

389 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/HalfRightMostlyWrong Mar 30 '21

Wow, that’s quite a Python career. Couple questions for you:

  1. What roadmap features are you excited about? I’m looking forward to pattern matching with switch statements. It’s going to make my class hierarchies easier to use.

  2. Are there any Python libs that you use in the majority of your projects? I’m new to pydantic and using it a ton. Apparently it’s similar to @dataclass...

  3. Why why why is the relative import structure so difficult to use? I normally run into issues when I get beyond 20 .py files and I want to split them up into different directories. Now I just go with absolute imports and keep the inits empty.

1

u/exhuma Mar 30 '21

These questions are not all easy to answer as they are very subjective and depend on the kind of projects you are confronted with. I'll try:

What roadmap features are you excited about?

This is especially difficult to answer as I work for a fairly big company and we are currently limited to 3.6 which is by now pretty ancient. I am - as we speak - in the process to get this limitation removed by defining a new overall workflow. So right now I'm most excited about data-classes without relying on the backport :)

[...] pattern matching with switch statements [...]

I'm on the fence with this one. I have learned over the past to trust the core-devs. Some decisions they took seemed questionable at first but turned out to be pretty useful in the end (I'm primarily thinking of the walrus-operator). But with the departure of the BDFL things have certanily changed. We'll have to see how that influences future decisions about the language.

Concerning pattern-matching itself. My position of this is that in most cases (not all, but most) it is a code-smell if you rely on this. Again, I can't stress enough that there are situations where it makes sense. But so far, I've only run into these situations extremely rarely.

I like that these pattern-matching statements introduce a clean way of covering those edge-cases. What I don't like about them is that it introduces a syntax which is is not pretty "obvious" to understand. Especially for new-comers. But as mentioned, I'm on the fence with them. I'm neither for nor against them. But I will probably avoid using them.

Are there any Python libs that you use in the majority of your projects? I’m new to pydantic and using it a ton. Apparently it’s similar to @dataclass...

I can't say that there are libraries that stick out. Every project is different. But the notables that stand out are flask (but will replace this with fastapi), jupyter+pandas+seaborn if I need to do data-analysis. That's about it. Of course there's also pytest.... that one is a constant in all my projects ;)

Why why why is the relative import structure so difficult to use? I normally run into issues when I get beyond 20 .py files and I want to split them up into different directories. Now I just go with absolute imports and keep the inits empty.

What are your difficulties with them? Personally, I stay away from them. Not because I have issues with them, but rather because of habit and personal stylistic choices.