Nice recovery to get back to a python topic! I was almost tempted to start venting about the election. :-)
PS. Thanks Benno. On 04/09/2013, at 10:04 AM, Javier Candeira <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 9:37 AM, dan <[email protected]> wrote: >> Slightly off topic but don't worry you're not the only one who finds it >> daunting: >> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-29/preference-deals-could-benefit-micro-parties-at/4920822 >> >> It's obviously broken and needs to be fixed but awesome that there's a tool >> to help work around it in the interim. > > Trying to keep the offtopic on-topic, there is an interesting > parallell between the cognitve loads associated with preferential > voting and the type of direct democracy practiced in California (where > they have many ballots at each election for with particular laws or > "initiative") and the micromanaging of types, access modifiers etc. in > enterprisey languages such as Java. > > There are tradeoffs everywhere. More control means more mental load. > Lower mental load means less control. Coming from a country where > Parliament is picked by closed lists, I appreciate the added control > of preference ranking for Parliament here. But it certainly adds a > mental toll. > > Coming from a language like Python 2, some people appreciate type > annotations in Python 3, so they don't have to perform guards in their > code at runtime. > > At Monash we're already running our first semester of Data Structures > and Algorithms using Python instead of Java. I'm now translating > sample code for students's pracs, and I find myself having to decide > at every point whether to let some type errors (like comparisons of > uncomparables types) pass to be caught by the Python runtime, or to > catch them and do something myself. All of those are errors that would > be caught by the Java compiler. > > It's interesting to see the student forums, because most of the errors > the students get stuck at are type errors (looking at a Node object > instead of extracting the item, assigning a variable from a function > that returns None), and all of those would have been previously caught > by their IDE. Now they have do debug on the run, and use their brain > instead of leveraging better tools. > > Tradeoffs. > > J > _______________________________________________ > melbourne-pug mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/melbourne-pug _______________________________________________ melbourne-pug mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/melbourne-pug
