En Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:01:53 -0200, Daniel Fetchinson
<fetchin...@googlemail.com> escribió:
On 2/9/09, Gabriel Genellina <gagsl-...@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
En Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:34:05 -0200, Daniel Fetchinson
<fetchin...@googlemail.com> escribió:
Consider whether you really need to use super().
http://fuhm.net/super-harmful/
Because throwing around that link carries about the same amount of
information as "perl is better than python", "my IDE is better than
yours", "vim rulez!", "emacs is cooler than vim", etc, etc.
Not at all. It contains accurate and valuable information that isn't
available elsewhere.
But does not contain other valuable information which would demystify
super. If only this source is shown to a person who wants to learn the
proper usage of super, the impression he/she gets will be distorted.
Why so? At the end there is a "best practices" recipe that pretty much
summarizes the proper usage of super, and AFAIK it's the right way to use
it. Don't you agree with any of the conclusions?
Example: 1. somebody asks about threading 2. reply comes: there is a
GIL! you can't do real threading. Now this reply might be technically
more-or-less correct, it is misleading and does not help the poster.
An informed discussion of the various solutions that does not involve
a rant about the GIL would be very useful though.
As I said, the article presents a "recipe" for super() usage, and I'd
consider it very helpful. It's far from just saying "super s*cks!", or
"the GIL s*cks!" or something like that.
You might want to start with
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=236275
...which, although the author says it was written a long time ago, was not
published until less than six months ago, and has very low visibility.
You are right, it's not in the documentation. But if somebody asks on
c.l.p the appropriate answer, I think, is to point to information such
as the one above, and not the misleading "harmful" essay.
According to Google, nobody has menctioned the "harmful" essay in this
group since April 2008 [1], months before Simionato's article were
available... So this is the *first* time the reference to the former essay
could have been replaced by M.S.' one... don't be so strict!
Anyway, the right thing to do, IMHO, is to publish correct and accurate
documentation in the main Python site. Not everybody knows about this
group existence, nor has the time/experience/interest on subscribe here,
post a question and wait for an answer. I've seen some posts in python-dev
saying something like "this is confusing, we should evangelize people on
c.l.p. on the right way to do it" and I completely disagree; the right
place for such things is the product documentation, or -to a much lesser
degree because it's online only- some article collection linked from the
main site (like the "Other resources" left bar, already present).
Honestly, I don't understand how this thing got so much out of
control. If anyone starts an intelligent question or remark about
super, this essay is thrown in no matter what. Anyone can explain why?
Because for a very loooooong time (seven years, 2001-2008) super was
almost undocumented. The Library Reference -before release 2.6- only
had a short paragraph, the [...]
You are right, the documentation needs some work in this regard. But
again, just because some sources are not in the documentation doesn't
mean that the most opinionated essay is the best source. A little
search turns up much more useful ones.
(not according to Google [2]: I get the "harmful" article in the top, the
thread in python-dev, a couple threads in c.l.p including posts by M.S.,
his article in artima, and nothing more relevant than "Monty Python Super
Star" up to the 3rd page)
*Now* that *I* am aware of the recent article series by M.S., the next
time someone asks *me* about super(), probably I'll refer her to both M.S.
and J.K.'s articles. Last time I checked (perhaps one or two years ago),
the "harmful" article was almost the only relevant source of info about
super().
[1]
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/search?q=super+harmful&start=0&scoring=d&;
[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=python+super
--
Gabriel Genellina
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
