Tuesday, July 11, 2023

honking namespaces

A job interview I'm on might touch on Python. I asked ChatGPT to bring me up to speed a bit, knowing that I have good knowledge Javascript and a small pile of other exposures of varying ages and intensity (Java, PHP, Perl, etc)

It mentioned the "Zen of Python" you get when you type `import this` into the Python interpreter:

>>> import this The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

I like it a lot, and find it amenable to my views and practice. The main thing I might not get is the last one (well maybe it's the second to last one - there's rumors of an unprinted 20th one which might be a kind of metajoke about not saying too much) - Python has scoping (as does everyone) so it's not clear if it's a call for more explicit namespacing or what.

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