Any cost? Armageddon it is!

without type safety your code is no longer predictable or maintainable

This sounds like someone who’s never worked on a large Python project with multiple developers. I’ve been doing this for almost two decades and we never encounter bugs because of mismatched types.

For reference, the most common bugs we encounter are related to exception handling. Either the code captured the exception and didn’t do the right thing (whatever that is) in specific situations or it didn’t capture the exception in the right place so it bubbles up waaaaay too high up the chain and we end up with super annoying troubleshooting where it’s difficult to reproduce or difficult to track down.

Also, testing is completely orthogonal to types.

Yeah that’s annoying but it’s a short-term problem. Python just recently cleaned up some long-standing issues that broke backwards compatibility in packaging (for certain things). Most public modules that broke made trivial changes to fix the problems (once they learned about them) and life went on.

However, for some fucking reason a whole bunch of dependencies related to AI are dragging their feet and taking forever to fix their shit. Insisting that everyone “just use Python 3.10” and it drives me nuts too.

This problem started to become a real thing almost two years ago (so they had plenty of warning and time to fix things) and yet here we are with still a handful of core dependencies that won’t install for things like Stable Diffusion, Flux, and various LLM stuff because they’re dragging their feet.

I blame corporate culture: Enterprises hate upgrading their shit and they’re as slow as glaciers sometimes. There’s probably tooling at Nvidia, for example, that needs a ton of work for Torch to work with new versions of Python and since all their documentation already was written for running on Python 3.10 (and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) they’ve created a lot of work for themselves.

Any day now they’ll finally finish fixing all these little dependencies and then we’ll have another two years of ease before the problem rises again with Python 3.14 and it’s massive GIL-free improvements that require big changes in code to actually take advantage of them.

Why? The most annoying thing that I remember about it was popular modules that hadn’t been ported yet. In essence, a temporary problem; growing pains.

The Unicode/string/bytes changes were welcome (to me). But that might just be because I had actually encountered situations where I had to deal with seemingly endless complexity and ambiguity related to Unicode stuff and encodings. Python 3 made everything much more logical 🤷

Haha: “A space breaks everything.” Fuck YES! Are you kidding me‽ It’s one of the best features!

Why? Because it’s so easy to see. In other languages you’ve got semicolons which are surprisingly difficult to notice when they’re missing. Depending on the situation (or if you’re just new to programming) you could spend a great deal of time troubleshooting your code only to find out that you’re missing a semicolon. It’s frustrating and it makes you feel stupid which is never a good thing for people who are new programming.

Types are in a different category altogether with seemingly infinite reasons why you’d want a feature-rich, low-level type system and also why you’d want to avoid that.

IMHO, the point of Python is to be a simple language that’s quick to write yet also very powerful and speedy when you need it to be (by taking advantage of modules written in C or better, Rust). If it had a complex type system I think it would significantly lower the value of the language. Just like how when I see an entire code repo using Pydantic and type hints everywhere it makes the code unnecessarily complex (just use type hints where it matters 🙄).

I’m not saying using type hints on everything is a terrible thing… I just think it makes the code harder to read which, IMHO defeats the point of using Python and adds a TON of complexity to the language.

The promise of type hints is that they’ll enable the interpreter to significantly speed up certain things and reduce memory utilization by orders of magnitude at some point in the future. When that happens I’ll definitely be reevaluating the situation but right now there doesn’t seem to be much point.

For reference, I’ve been coding in Python for about 18 years now and I’ve only ever encountered a bug (in production) that would’ve been prevented by type hints once. It was a long time ago, before I knew better and didn’t write unit tests.

These days when I’m working on code that requires type hints (by policy; not actual necessity) it feels like doing situps. Like, do I really need to add a string type hint to a function called, parse_log()? LOL!

You’re never right 🤷

Kind of like how there’s taste buds in our lungs.

For those that don’t know, this is one popular way of laundering money.

The other is real estate (which is how Trump made his comeback from early business failures).

Historically, there were probably tens of thousands of people named, “Jesus” around that time. There were also loads and LOADS of people crucified by the Romans. If you were to make up a story and try to make it believable wouldn’t you pick a likely starting point?

Santa is a stand-in for Jesus… for children. They’re both magical beings that can perform miracles and have similar methods: Both Santa and Jesus have naughty lists and forms of punishment that come later; much later (both are equivalent lengths of time to a child though 🤣). Both bring “gifts”. Both have traditional appearances. Both have followers that wear silly hats and strange clothes. But most importantly…

Both are imaginary.

If you believe in Santa as an adult you’re ridiculed. If you believe in Jesus as an adult you’re just labeled, “Christian”. Yet the fact that nearly every child eventually finds out Santa isn’t real is quite disturbing to a lot of Christians. After all, if they could stop believing in Santa–who is so similar to Jesus in every way–then they could stop believing in Jesus.

First “myth” is wrong. Loading CSS and JS with every click isn’t about being “slow” it’s about being efficient. CSS and JS requests add a non-trivial load to the server. So if you have 10,000 clients making requests for content they already have cached (they’re just checking to see if these assets changed) then you’re wasting server resources when you could’ve just kept the single page active and requested just what you needed over an AJAX call or even better: A WebSocket.

Sounds sooooo second class to me. I only deal with first class languages so I can enjoy my curry with a satisfying closure 🎩 👌

Software patents shouldn’t exist!

Surely they can’t all be this dumb.

After a few decades following American politics you’ll realize that yes, yes they can all be that dumb.

Just have a general conversation with your most conservative neighbors about basically anything and you’ll quickly learn that there’s nothing they don’t have an opinion on and their level of ignorance is… Impressive.

Like, dude, you’re 60+ years old and you think hurricanes are a conspiracy‽ The point where they lost their mind was long ago.

Sooner or later you can’t help but wonder if they ever had sanity or they just faked it long enough to have a career/survive until retirement.

Building your own keyboard is supposed to be fun. You do some research to figure out what you want. Maybe order some sample switches to try out, pick out a keycap set you like, and eventually settle on a kit.

When you order your kit it’ll include a case, a top plate, and a circuit board. If you get one with hot swap sockets you will not have to solder anything. You can literally just press the switches in.

Then when you’re done you screw everything together, put your keycaps on, and you have a working keyboard. Sometimes you have to flash the firmware as a final step but that’s not rocket science. You do not have to know how to program.

You don’t have to solder if you use hot swap sockets for your switches. Even if you never plan to swap the switches the hot swap sockets mean you’ll never have to solder a thing 👍

Just build your own keyboard. That’s what I did (and it turned out fantastic) 🤷

Mice are much easier to deal with since there’s 500 million of them to choose from. Just pick a generic, no-name brand that doesn’t need drivers and you’re all set.

Aside: Building a keyboard isn’t rocket science. It’s just a bit tedious (buy a kit). Unless you invent your own 3D printable keyboard switch and stabilizers from scratch then design an analog circuit board to work with them (also from scratch). Then it’s a bit more like rocket science 🤣

I just shake the water off like a dog.

I’ve used this term before in a different context: It’s what happens when someone is about to do something that both scares and excites them at the same time. Like when a person suddenly finds themselves extremely attracted to someone and they want to make a good impression. That’s when their brain seems to be both there and not there at the same time.

When observing someone in this sort of situation you quickly come to the conclusion that the brain has gone but then later–upon reflection–it may seem like it may have actually been present. The only way to know for sure is to find out how the events eventually concluded; opening the box as it were.

That’s when you find out whether or not the person was a pussy.