Slashdot Mirror
Open-Source Python Code Shows Lowest Defect Density
cold fjord sends news that a study by Coverity has found open-source Python code to contain a lower defect density than any other language. "The 2012 Scan Report found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects that leverage the Coverity Scan service, as compared to the accepted industry standard defect density for good quality software of 1.0. Python's defect density of .005 significantly surpasses this standard, and introduces a new level of quality for open source software. To date, the Coverity Scan service has analyzed nearly 400,000 lines of Python code and identified 996 new defects — 860 of which have been fixed by the Python community."
"Coverity fails to detect errors in python" would be my headline of choice here. Seem a much more reasonable explanation for the results.
Python is readable and readable code is easier to fix.
Also smarter guy have tendency to use Python/Haskell/Erlang
Oh yeah? Well, I'm working on a readable Perl script to refute that statement. How long do they accept comments in these threads?
Most of Python isn't written in Python, smart ass. They're talking about the language interpreter itself, written in C/C++ etc.
I read TFS and both TFAs and all I can glean is that Coverity Scan service is some sort of report that measures defects in code, but never defines how such defect are determined. They articles also mention comparing open source code metrics, but the only project that is mentioned anywhere is Python.
So what is a Coverity Scan service and why should I care? After all I can make up all sorts of metrics about my own software.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I could not find a link to the actual study, instead the company links lead back to the article and the article leads back to the company home page. Is this more "faith-based computing"? I am interested in the comparisons to other languages and in what type of code was analyzed.
TFA seems to be about the Python interpreter, also known as CPython (because it's implemented in C), rather than about code written in Python itself. So maybe it has nothing to do with the Python language, but everything to do with the fact that the Python authors are apparently awesome C programmers.
That's great, but most people interpret "Open Source Python Code" to mean code written in Python that is Open Source, not code written in C (to implement the Python interpreter) that is Open Source.
Does it mean better coders, or better language? Seems like the results are ambiguous in their meaning.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The Slashdot summary is confusing, as is the eweek.com headline. Reading the article, it is clear that it is about the code that powers the official Python interpreter, AKA CPython, AKA /usr/bin/python. When I clicked the link, I thought Coverity had surveyed the entire world of open source Python code and discovered that Python programmers as a whole publish higher quality code than people who e.g. program in Ruby. That's not what the article's about.
It'd be great if the headline in Slashdot were to be fixed to say, "Python interpreter has fewer code defects compared to other open source C programs, says Coverity."
|/usr/games/fortune
0.005 defects per thousand lines times 400,000 lines gives a total defect count of 2.
So where did the other 994 defects come from?
So a private, for-profit company named "Coverity" has released a report that shows that their "Coverity Scan" software finds the fewest vaguely-defined "defects" in a programming language whose community has added the "Coverity platform" product to their development process? I was about to say "excellent marketing" by writing a fluff piece for free Slashdot traffic, but it's really not even excellent marketing.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Coverity sells software that does static analysis on source code and looks for patterns that suggest defects. E.G., a code sequence that allocates memory, followed later by something that de-allocates that memory, followed later by something that de-allocates the same memory again (a double-free).
The product is not open source software, but a number of open source software projects use it to scan their software to find defects: https://scan.coverity.com/ It's a win-win, in the sense that Coverity gets reports from real users using it on real code, as well as press for their product. The open source software projects get reports on potential defects before users have to suffer with them.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Coverity's services have been useful to a number of open-source projects. But this article is carefully picking its terms to get a headline worthy result. Compare against the Coverity scan of PostgreSQL done in 2005 for example, and CPython's defect rate isn't very exciting at all. But that was "Coverity Prevent" and this is "Coverity Scan"...whatever that means.
The defect detector depends on brackets. The 0.005 defects found is because no code is perfect.
n/t
The title is misleading again as hell. It appears they talk about the C code included in the Python compiler/interpreter project, and it is to be compared against other open source software projects, not against other languages. All that it shows is the Python project developers are eager to fix problems what this particular verification software founds. If they have fixed all those bugs, then they will have exactly zero known defects. Good for them, but most probably there will remain unknown defects, and it is hard to measure their amount.
In short, a meaningless article and a misleading title. The correct headline would have been "Python core developers are fixing bugs with help of a tool".
If bugs are defects then Python has, and has had, heaps. Number one defect is mandatory indentation. If only they had used C-style braces! Unfortunately then it would almost look exactly the same as C. There is little in Python that a good library cannot also do for C/C++/C# or whatever.
They counted my C++ features as bugs?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I've seen multiple-kilobyte posts before. Slashdot truncates it on initial display with a 'read more' link appended to the end, that shows the full post.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Numbers like .69 or 1.0 or 0.005 mean nothing if you don't know to what it relates.
Usually defect counts are based on 1k LOC (one thousand lines of code, and no: a line of code is likely not what you consider a line of code).
I doubt that 1.0 is a accepted industry standard defect density [...] for good quality software of ...
1 defect per 1 kLOC is absurd high, luckily I never was in a project the last 20 years with such a high defect rate.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes it would, as the Python interpreter is open source: Python License & History
- No Bounce, No Play -
Python is readable and readable code is easier to fix.
Also smarter guy have tendency to use Python/Haskell/Erlang
Oh yeah? Well, I'm working on a readable Perl script to refute that statement. How long do they accept comments in these threads?
How is this possible? Perl is a write only language.
The result in question tested the Python project's code, which is commonly known as CPython, which is the Python interpreter written in C.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
@*(&^)&^)^$
Perl programmers write their code in cartoon profanity!
While it can be useful in pinpointing common code defects, interpreting coverity results as an absolute indicator of code quality is just retarded. 90% of coverity's defect's tend to be really false positives that would be obvious to even the average code monkey... Not sure that massaging a code base to please coverity and getting a 'high score' is really any kind of achievement and may be more an indicator that you have way too much time on your hands...
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
it might have an advantage in forcing lazy programmers with no concept of 'code etiquette' to write semi-readable code as indentation is forced by syntax.
on the other hand, making indentation part of the language creates all sorts of other readability problems.
they probably started trudging through thousands of python files and got to the 20th and though "fuck this is giving me a headache... that's enough bugs already", and then published their number of bugs found out of the thousands of files they intended to check but couldn't bear to.
i like pascal as a language. i know it takes a fraction of a second longer to type "begin" instead of "{" or some other block delimiter, but it makes for very readable code, particularly with syntax highlighting on, and even if you're having to suffer the code of others. i also use php which feels a little C'ish, but its more symbolic than pascal but with similar whitespace freedom, which can make readability harder if you aren't a convention perfectionist (which i think programmers should strive to be, at least in their code).
This is bullshit, but a great tactical conversion of non-informative data into marketable news by Coverity.
Coverity uses lexical pattern matching to find bugs based on "tricks" discovered by Dawson Engler and his colleagues in Stanford University in the early 2000s. The tricks (find "malloc" not coupled with "free", cli() not coupled with sti(), dereferences of uninitialized pointers etc.) were developed in the context of the C language used for Operating System code.
So they used tricks developed for one language and context, to another language in a different context, and found that they didn't find as many bugs in the latter as they did in the former. You would think that this suggests a failure - in that their techniques are not quite as effective on Python as they were on C. Instead, they have turned it around as a statement on the inherent high quality of Python code.
It's like saying that the fact that a good tennis player sucks at playing table tennis, it implies that table tennis is a harder game.
I think GP meant time, as in how long the comment sections stay open for posting. The answer is plenty long enough to finish a readable perl project, as long as TFAC doesn't have a life. Or waste time on petty little thinks like sleep. :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Doesn't surprise me. Obviously, Python is not suitable for everything. But, it is easy to read, easy to write code in, avoids those little issues of C and even Java where some OK-looking code is in fact a security risk. I think it's permitting virtually any programming model you want is helpful too (you want this part to use functional programming, and this part object oriented? Go ahead.) This sounds like a receipe for disaster but avoids the condition of the programmer having to force some particular problem to follow a particular programming method because that's what the language supports best... it supports all methods.
It appears you're right. Neither the submitter nor the article writer understand the difference between "code written in Python" and "the CPython interpreter, which is written in C", which is what Coverity actually tested. So 90% of the comments are off topic. Mods - kudos to the parent.
Python is readable and readable code is easier to fix.
True and true. But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
But that's not even terribly relevant here, because this article is about the source code used for the python interpreter, which is C, not python.
it might have an advantage in forcing lazy programmers with no concept of 'code etiquette' to write semi-readable code as indentation is forced by syntax.
Since the "density" is measured in defects per lines of code, I siggest that Python mandate an extra line return between all lines. Then they could half their defect density. Done.
Someone had to do it.
never heard of defect density before. i learned something new today.
Lazy programmers are not someone I want to work with (if they can't be bothered when this kind of thing is built-in for most, if not all, worthwhile text editors/IDEs, how can you trust them to not be lazy when it comes to actual hard work?) If by some miracle they're lazy, but output good code, then there are tools to reformat code to a specific style.
But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
This is one thing I never quite get about python criticism. Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say. Then again, I don't go past 2 or 3 levels of nesting, class nesting included. And all my units of work are in separate methods/functions instead of being child blocks inside a giant function which I've regularly seen done. Perhaps the use of whitespace isn't the real issue many people have with python, but rather delineating blocks using whitespace exposes a bit of an inherent flaw in the way they structure their program's flow.
Either way, having a proper IDE when writing python code will go a long way to making you comfortable with using whitespace instead of braces. Initially it was weird and unsettling for me, because I didn't understand all the consequences that whitespace could have. But a little fluid and constant coding in a IDE will rid you of that quick enough.
it might have an advantage in forcing lazy programmers with no concept of 'code etiquette' to write semi-readable code as indentation is forced by syntax.
on the other hand, making indentation part of the language creates all sorts of other readability problems.
You'd be surprised at how much syntax in python actively ignores whitespace. As soon as you open up any brackets, it's a veritable free-for-all when it comes to whitespace and indentation. In such a scenario, a proper coding standard document is imperative for readable code.
You can thank "cold fjoord" for that. Slashdot collectively seems to enjoy sucking his cock as I see his shit propaganda modded up constantly.
Great. Now where the hell do you quote it from, since that sure as hell isn't in the linked to article anywhere.
That makes it pretty clear that they are talking about the Python executable itself. Version 3.3.2 to be exact.
... and that clearly shows that they are talking about the interpreter, written in C, which has pointers, malloc() and free(). Python has a memory manager with garbage collection and doesn't use pointers. The Python programmer doesn't allocate and free memory resources directly.
I especially love how you criticized a language earlier, when you clearly have literally no knowledge of said language.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You went past the point where you knew what you are talking about.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
... which would matter if the Python interpreter was written in Python. It's not. It is written primarily in C.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
That would not change the number of lines of code. An LOC is a logical unit not measured by the number of carraige returns or printable lines. For example, here is a single line of C code:
;
int
my_int
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Haskell is written in Haskell by coders that only think in Haskell.
I saw a trivial example break when posted to /. not that long ago, in the interview.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Nope, nobody at all http://www.python.org/about/success/
Jeez.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
If you write a readable Perl script, then you've completely missed the point of the language. Ever hear of job security?
"One of the more interesting defects that Coverity identified in Python that developers have since fixed is a "double-free" defect."
Shit! Haven't they ever heard about valgrind?
So, it's definitely spam then?
Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say.
Not python, but one example of this type of thing would be in a Makefile where target commands are indented by a tab. Some newer versions of (g)make will allow spaces, but most require a tab. Cut and paste that in an X-Windows session (tabs are converted to spaces) and you're screwed. From Make Software: Makefiles
Each command line must begin with a tab character to be recognized as a command. The tab is a whitespace character, but the space character does not have the same special meaning. This is problematic, since there may be no visual difference between a tab and a series of space characters. This aspect of the syntax of makefiles is often subject to criticism.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They probably have. The Python interpreter is pretty complicated and valgrind isn't foolproof. Furthermore, if you don't have test cases that expose the problem, valgrind won't find them since it doesn't do static analysis of code, it hooks the calls to malloc() and free() and reference counts. Valgrind is an awesome tool, but if you run your program and valgrind doesn't complain that doesn't mean it is bug free, unless it is a very procedural / linear program and you can guarantee that every execution path has been taken and all the corner cases have been captured in your use cases / unit tests.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
As I recall, the comments in that thread pointed out that no sane coder would be transferring code using such a medium as html that mangles white space.
Although, I have been bitten many times when copy-pasting python code between a text file and the command line. Though I've mostly gotten around that problem by working with files rather than trying to use the CLI to input arbitrary python code as every single console does it slightly differently.
I once thought about learning python. Then i combed craigslist across the US looking for job opportunities doing python programming. Relatively few out there by comparison to ASP.NET and Java. Sure its less buggy.....but whats to motivate anyone to learn something they can't easily find work in?
This is one thing I never quite get about python criticism. Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say.
Anytime you refactor stuff, or modify something even somewhat nested, especially in a 'dumb text editor', it's a pain in the ass.
Anytime you need to pass code snippets via email, forums, etc... well... you just don't because its a total waste of time. :)
Its also easy to barf all over code going into word processors, pdf files, and so forth. Its nice to be able to copy-paste some C out of a PDF file or an email, or off a forum, and then tell the ide to just reformat it.
erhaps the use of whitespace isn't the real issue many people have with python, but rather delineating blocks using whitespace exposes a bit of an inherent flaw in the way they structure their program's flow.
No. Because we use whitespace / indenting in our C / C++ etc projects too. We even have standards requiring it, and our IDEs / toolchains may even be set up to reformat it just-so before commits. We want all the benefits of well formatted code.
We just like the IDE to do all the work actually formatting it, and reformatting it as neccessary.
Either way, having a proper IDE
Is how you lose the argument. Everyone but python groupies agrees that any programming language worth considering MUST have its programs represented as plaintext files, with no proprietary / binary stuff that can only be accessed with specialized tools. Requiring an IDE is the sign of a bad language.
Python passes this test, but it can be pretty hideous to use with an arbitrary text editor. And really, even brainfuck wouldn't be too bad with the right IDE, right?
Hey, an idiot on slashdot!
That makes more sense. From the summary, I thought the most likely scenario was that Coverity does not handle Python code very well based on my experience of random buggy Python code. It is to be expected that a widely used VM/interpreter is going to be of better quality than your average code.
The code is so slow, they have lots of extra time to look for defects.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Once I decided to rewrite a script that I have written in Perl to Python, just to get a grip of it. But I soon dropped, cause the overall documentation is so poor compared to CPAN.
Is how you lose the argument. Everyone but python groupies agrees that any programming language worth considering MUST have its programs represented as plaintext files, with no proprietary / binary stuff that can only be accessed with specialized tools. Requiring an IDE is the sign of a bad language.
I don't think you understood what I was trying to say here. The IDE is there to teach you the boundaries when it comes to whitespace in python. Bad indentation, mismatching brackets and overall bad syntax gets picked up immediately and you are warned. Just like you get syntax error highlighting in other languages. Python's usage of whitespace scares a lot of people and keeps them from experimenting. The IDE is what I think would help them overcome their fear/uncertainty. If anything, Python is one of the languages where it's explicitly less required to have an IDE and still be proficient in it.
Often the goal of having a program written in Perl is to get something slammed out and running as quickly as possible. Give a sloppy language like Perl to a talented cowboy, and you can get a huge amount of functionality in a short time.
On any enterprise-level project with > 10^5 lines of code, whitespace as syntax is brittle, no matter what tools you throw at it.
(My wife manages such a project. Python is actually pretty good outside of that, but for new projects I'd probably go with Groovy, Scala, or Haskell.)
On the other hand, there are also proportionally many Java and .NET programmers, so you'll be competing with fewer people in Python land.
The right answer, anyway, is to learn all three - and a couple more (C++, in particular).
Yes, they have. It is part of the testing suite.
Not python, but one example of this type of thing would be in a Makefile where target commands are indented by a tab.
Yeah, tabs in makefiles are a source of pain. I'm glad that vim has syntax highlighting so that the line doesn't look right if you don't have the tab like you should do.
But in Python, I haven't had much trouble. As long as the lines are indented identically, the language is happy; and if the lines are not indented identically, that is an error, and you know you need to fix it. I would call it "brittle" if you could have subtle errors caused by different whitespace, but that just doesn't happen.
The recommended standard, in the Python community, is to use nothing but spaces. I have vim set to expand tabs to spaces when editing a Python file. Then, what you see is what you are getting, pasted code works perfectly, etc.
And the best thing: in Python, if a bunch of lines are indented together in an "if" statement, such that they look like a block... then they ARE a block. You never get the weird situation where the lines are indented together but the coder forgot to put the braces and only the first line of the intended block is controlled by the if statement. That one can be a right pain to figure out if you aren't single-stepping in a debugger.
I'll say it again: in Python, if the block of lines looks right, it is right and it will work right. I like this.
The Python whitespace thing is neither totally awesome nor totally sucky, but on balance I think it's a good thing.
The tab (n) spaces thing is very unfortunate for make. However, any reasonable IDE/Editor will tell you if you make the mistake of using spaces in a Makefile.
I can see that you're an idiot. I don't know why you bothered to post.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I'd say a proper editor, not IDE. You're always just a quick vim/emacs setting away from having it keep your tabs properly delineated. Plus, if you consider deep nesting to be a code smell then it's even nicer to have Python force you to see all of that whitespace so you keep your code smelling a bit nicer. And whitespace isn't it, either. PEP-8 is so pervasive as a style guide for Python coders that it's even easier to read due to the semi-standardization of code.
If you're using a "dumb" text editor, then don't complain about it. That's like using a calculator without (co)sine and whining that you have to do it the hard way. And if you're going to pull that "it might not be installed" chestnut on me, then explain why you're programming on a terminal without a decent editor. No USB port? No web connection? You've got bigger problems.
Blaming Python because you don't have a rudimentary coding editor is like blaming math because you don't have a calculator with a cosine button.
What about the bit about Coverity Scan only supporting Java and C/C++?
So when are we going to get a native Python compiler ?
The reason for newline-tab being syntactically significant in makefiles is because by the time make's author, Stuart Feldman, realized the problems with this choice there were already about a dozen users of make and he didn't want to break any of their makefiles with an incompatible change. See _The Art of Unix Programming_ by Eric S. Raymond.
The lesson is the time to fix a bad design decision is as soon as possible, because it's not going to get any easier later; unless or until your program becomes irrelevant, at which point there's little reason to fix it at all.
The parent post didn't deserve to be modded down. It is highly credible that Lua would have a very low defect rate. Lua has a small, clean, source code base, and it was audited by large organizations such as Verisign for high reliability databases and by The Wikimedia Foundation for security.
and then tell the ide to just reformat it.
[...]
Either way, having a proper IDE
Is how you lose the argument.
*cough*
FWIW, I'm developing python daily for 8 years to put food on the table, and I have never used an IDE. Unless you call vim an IDE, but I only really need syntax highlighting.
You're not really addressing the concerns at issue here: Nobody in the outside world cares that your IDE is teaching you proper whitespace syntax.
What the outside world cares about is that when your code, years from now, goes out into the world outside your IDE hothouse for delicate code-flowers, that it doesn't cause apoplexy and foaming at the mouth when your email handler, or some other group's language lawyer sets up a tab filter, so, say, for example, it produces a subtle bug you can't see with the debugger because of syntactically significant,
but debugger-invisible whitespace.
The fundamental weakness of sytactically significant whitespace is that you can't see it.
When your compiler or debugger (or you) barfs on a
visible token, it points at it. When it barfs on an invisible token, chances are it will inadvertantly implicate the previous visible token or the structure containing it, and you will go off chasing your tail down a rathole.
I think there's a lot to like about python, particularly how it's been a force to clean up libraries that have been miasmically floating around since forever. But I have lost too many hours to syntactally significant whitespace to be happy about it. It's an idea we have to put up with, but let's not convfince ourselves that it's a good idea, it ain't. It was horribly costly in human hours for makefiles, and it's still just as horrible for python.
Python is readable and readable code is easier to fix.
True and true. But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
Furthermore Python's needless attribution of syntactical meaning to whitespace means it's useless for embedding certain languages...
...Like Whitespace.
Today many languages support Unicode source code which can have tons of new spaces of varying width including zero-width and non-breaking-zero-width space. The multitude of new spaces would make indention distinction all the more brittle, but this also means new extensions to Whitespace can provide more rich and full featured embedded language support to most modern programming languages -- Except Python.
*cough*
The code reformatting can be done manually, via a command line tool, via the IDE or not at all. My mention of using an IDE to reformat text doesn't create the same IDE dependency you refer to.
Blaming Python because you don't have a rudimentary coding editor is like blaming math because you don't have a calculator with a cosine button.
I don't have the luxury of designing "math". Irrational numbers, periodic functions, and so forth aren't optional.
But we do have the luxury of designing programming languages, and semantic white space is a choice.
... couldn't find the languages compared? Curious to know how Ada fared and if Python was compared against it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I've been paid to work with the Python interpreter before. If Coverity only found one use-after free, then either the quality of the code has dramatically improved in the last three years, or Coverity is slipping...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say
The Jabber Python MSN transport shipped with an intent bug in an error path for several releases. The error path was never hit on the developer's test machine, but always hit for me because I didn't install one of the optional libraries. The error was caused by mixing tabs and spaces, and so looked correct in the editor, but Python happened to interpret a tab as a different number of spaces to the editor[1] and so it ended up doing something different.
This is what people mean when they call it fragile. You can introduce bugs as a result, but never see them unless you hit the code path in question (this, by the way, is a common source of exploitable bugs in all languages: code paths that are rarely hit that contain bugs, and Python makes them so easy to introduce). Meanwhile, in any language that either enforced the no-mixing-tabs-and-spaces rule with static checking[2], or which had a block delimiter character, these would be caught statically at parse time.
I can think of no other language where such a high proportion of code that I've run that has shipped as working releases has needed me to fix it before it will even start. As far as I can tell, all of the refugees from VB6 ended up writing shoddy Python code. Is it the language's fault? Well, it certainly doesn't help. I've been asking Python programmers for the last year what an else clause on a for loop meant. Last Friday, one gave the correct answer for the first time. Why do I know what it means? Because a person who wrote some (and shipped) some code using it apparently didn't...
[1] Ignoring Python's general hostility to using the character that means 'indent by one level' for indents, any language with significant whitespace that doesn't error when you have a line that has both tabs and spaces at the start of a line is broken.
[2] I believe that Python now has an option to check this. It should have been on by default since the first release.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So what they are basically saying is "Don't use our product to scan Python code; it doesn't recognize all the defects".
I know the truth is possibly somewhere in the middle, but this report just assumes the scanning products works equally well for all languages, which is atleast somewhat unlikely.
Also, what exactly is a defect in this context? Is it a security flaw, a functional error or just something that will crash your software. If the latter is the case, then any language that accepts shitty code and just keeps will win regardless of whether the code actually works.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
If you write all code yourself you might not have this problem. If you ever copy and paste from somewhere else you might. I have run into that problem. It took many hours to find.
... which worked fine when I ran it.
print "Simpler:"[::-1]
* That'll do the job too, even simpler... per my subject-line above...
APK
P.S.=> I knew about THIS method too, but not only does my orginal post's code style look cooler imo, but it has err trapping + it's "homemade" (can't make the stuff look TOO simple or he really will think Python's a "toy", lol!)... apk
Trivial code is shared via html all others time by many coders, sane or not. It causes you problems too in it's fragility.
I personally think it's a fair price to pay for consistent style between coders (which makes multi coder projects easier to deal with too), but let's not pretend that it's without drawback.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If you're using a "dumb" text editor, then don't complain about it.
Your argument is back-to-front. Python has whitespace because of dumb editors. Guido's rationale was simple: when writing C in a dumb editor, there is redundancy of braces (for the computer) and spaces (for the human). There is the danger that the two might not match, and that a human debugging the code would misread the structure by following the indentation levels instead of the braces.
And here lies the problem: Guido's decision was for the sake of "plain text" and dumb editors, but the end result was to force the use of smart editors. Hell, even the "official" Python IDE, IDLE, isn't good enough IDEs that have block hiding have, as a consequence, block highlighting, a side-effect of which is the explicit marking of block start and end... that same redundancy that Guido wanted rid of to begin with.
I bet you're using a code editor with block highlighting...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
This all seems very misleading. It took me quite a while to figure out that it is only talking about the code for the Python interpreter, not all open-source programs written in Python.
What a shitty comment. It is not the fault of perl that some muppets do not use proper variable names instead of the implicit ones. It is not the fault of perl they don't nicely structure it into procedures (with proper names). Maybe you sysadmins-cum-hackorz should grab a Software Engineering book before your hit the keyboard on slashdot ???
I am sure we can reach 1000 posts level now when my-programming(-language)-is-better-than-yours thread is started :)
BTW: I have a longer penis than you!
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4162427&cid=44754641 = "better" (than yours on the 'point' you made), "young lad", lol! Try to see MY point there though (not a toy but can't let him *think* that, with 1 liners). "Touche", my boy...
APK
I've been asking Python programmers for the last year what an else clause on a for loop meant. Last Friday, one gave the correct answer for the first time. Why do I know what it means? Because a person who wrote some (and shipped) some code using it apparently didn't...
I didn't know that structure... it should be banned... it's totally "un-pythonic" in that it annihilates the principle of readability. Kill it with fire.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I am agile I do not use coding standards you insensitive clod.
"talented cowboy" which quickly becomes "miserable sonovabitch" when you have to clean up after his horse.
I do all my coding in vi. Generally "g/ /s///g" takes care of any white space problems, when importing folk code.
I hated using curlies when I had to start using Perl/javascript/PHP, but I got used to them. It's just a mental flexibility thing. It sucks at first, but after a couple of days I have no trouble.
One thing python has done for me vis. other languages is I don't nest. Generally, I have found if I have a big old stalactite of conditionals, that they can be replaced with a function call that simplifies the flow for other humans and my future self.
Yeah, the search and replace got munged. Pretend there is a tab in the replace portion.
That is the fault of Perl HOW ?
PHP is a big-time security risk these days, but different to Perl, it is due to all sorts of "comfort" features you don't even see. With Perl, you clearly see if somebody was too lazy to assign an implicit variable to a meaningful one.
For example
if( $row ~= /(.*)(gz|txt|zip)$/ )
{
my $nameWithoutExtension = $1;
my $extension $2;
if( foo($entension) )
{
blabbla()
}
}
No it wouldn't, we cannot run the same test on closed source software if we don't have access to the source.
But then again: the closed source programmers can even claim less, since they don't show their source.
I was at a talk at PyCon, and the speaker said he wished that the keyword was "if_no_break".
The "else:" clause is executed when the for loop runs to the end without the "break" keyword being used. It is most handy for things like this:
for item in some_list:
if is_the_item_we_want(item):
break
else:
handle_error_that_item_we_want_not_found()
This isn't un-Pythonic, but the overloading of the "else" keyword for a construct that no other language has isn't the best.
Not python, but one example of this type of thing would be in a Makefile where target commands are indented by a tab.
Yeah, tabs in makefiles are a source of pain. I'm glad that vim has syntax highlighting so that the line doesn't look right if you don't have the tab like you should do.
But in Python, I haven't had much trouble. As long as the lines are indented identically, the language is happy; and if the lines are not indented identically, that is an error, and you know you need to fix it. I would call it "brittle" if you could have subtle errors caused by different whitespace, but that just doesn't happen.
The recommended standard, in the Python community, is to use nothing but spaces. I have vim set to expand tabs to spaces when editing a Python file. Then, what you see is what you are getting, pasted code works perfectly, etc.
And the best thing: in Python, if a bunch of lines are indented together in an "if" statement, such that they look like a block... then they ARE a block.
No. If a bunch of lines are indented such that they look like a block and your editor is set up as you describe above, they are a block. Considering you just discussed your editor's configuration, I'm not sure how you missed the tiny detail that it matters.
If we are to accept your statement, why can't some C guy running emacs with a sufficiently advanced pile of lisp code (auto-indenting everything whenever he adds/removes a brace, and preventing him from manually mis-indenting a line) say the same thing of C. He's placed most the burden of making that statement on his editor's configuration, while you've placed most of the burden on the language syntax, but in both cases, the truth of that assertion depends on both. And since editor configuration varies, that prevents either of you from being correct in making that assertion w/r/t the general case.
I'll say it again: in Python, if the block of lines looks right, it is right and it will work right. I like this.
Say it all you want, but recognize that it can be false for Python, and can be true for any other language -- Python's syntax just makes the editor configuration needed very simple instead of fiendishly complex.
(I suppose an emacs fan might characterize Python as a language with a built-in crutch for silly little text editors that can't handle more conventional syntax well. But then, I've not been particularly impressed with either GNU emacs or xemacs, at least with anything like their default configurations, for editing C syntax, which is among many reasons I stay out of those flamewars...)
What is that shitty editor you're using that can't even indent/unindent lines? Also, never post any code to a forum that doesn't allow wrapping it in a <pre> or <code>. Indentation is just one of the many things that will get broken.
You don't know what math is. Do you really think God designed irrational numbers? No, humans invented them. We just found them handy at some point, but there is no law of nature that postulates their existence and says we must write them a + bi .
High performance math calculations are done in Fortran not C.
Not only will the Fortran program run faster than the same in C, it will be easier to write.
If I have to write a complex data structure with strict perfomance requirements, I will write it in OCaml, not C.
If I have a program that is long running, needs high performance and has many unknowables at compile-time(what branch to take, should this be inlined, etc) I will use a good JVM language, maybe Java, perhaps Scala or Clojure and definitely not Groovy nor C.
If I need performance and excellent parallel processing abilities I use Erlang and not C.
Sure if I am writing something low level or speeding up a chunk of a program written in Python or Ruby that my profiler shows needs work, I will consider rewriting that chunk in C.
C is not always the fastest solution.
Yes whitespace is a choice, but it is long settled(1936) that programming is equivalent to mathematics via both lambda calculus and turing machines.
Adding a cosine button on a calculator is a choice.
It doesn't matter how you write them, irrational numbers exist in nature.
This is one thing I never quite get about python criticism. Sure, whitespace is significant, but I've never had it break easily or be "brittle" as you say. Then again, I don't go past 2 or 3 levels of nesting, class nesting included. And all my units of work are in separate methods/functions instead of being child blocks inside a giant function which I've regularly seen done. Perhaps the use of whitespace isn't the real issue many people have with python, but rather delineating blocks using whitespace exposes a bit of an inherent flaw in the way they structure their program's flow.
In fact python's use of whitespace _enforces_ readability and better structuring. I don't recall the source unfortunately, but I remember reading studies that showed that the number of nested blocks was a predictor of code errors; that seems like common sense to me. It can make it harder to copy/paste code, but the readability advantage is totally worth the minor inconvenience. Many simple editors help with formatting, e.g. you can Tab or Shift+Tab blocks with gedit. And you can use spaces instead of tabs too. It's not a real problem.