On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 07:10:38PM +0200, Alex Hall wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 6:32 PM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> > Personally, I found your examples underwhelming because they're mostly
> > repetitions of the same pattern.
> >
>
> That's surprising to me. When I see the same pattern over and over that's
> when I most want to refactor into a common function/method. The repetition
> is annoying and the solution is easy and obvious.
The repetition doesn't go away just because you give it a name. It's
just easier to manage.
> If the cases were all
> different it'd be much more complicated and chances are there wouldn't be a
> simple function that covered all cases.
>
> Do you not usually refactor duplicated code? What *do* you refactor?
Depends on what the code is. If it's as trivial as a try...except with a
single operation inside each block, it's hardly worth the bother to add
an extra level of indirection, an extra function, just to reduce what is
effectively a two-liner (albeit one which is commonly spread over four
lines) to a one-liner:
# Before
try: x = L[index]
except IndexError: x = ""
# After
x = get(L, index, "")
Save a line of code, replace it with one more function to read, document
and test. Instead of having to read a two (four) line try...except block
where everything is explicitly in front of my eyes, I have to read a
fairly bland and generic-looking "get" function where I'm not sure
*precisely* what it does witout reading the docs.
Get what? Does it support negative indices? Can it fail? If I change L
to a deque will it continue to work?
I'm not *against* it. I think if lists already had the method I wouldn't
object to its existence. I'm just finding it hard to care, and I think
that's probably the main issue you are up against. This doesn't have a
compelling benefit, it's quite marginal, at least in the use-case above.
That's my opinion, others may disagree.
> I'd find it more interesting if there
> > were a larger variety of cases
> >
>
> This sort of sounds like the problem. The examples aren't meant to be
> interesting.
You're asking why people aren't interested in solving this issue, you
wonder why few people are terribly interested in it, and now you're
saying that its not supposed to be interesting.
I think that explains the relative lack of interest :-)
That's just my two cents though, others may feel differently.
--
Steve
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