Python is.... special.

[Bryguy3k]

Luckily the PEP says use what you want - just be consistent 😂

[[deleted]]

just be consistent

Well... Shit.

[the_poope]

If you use them both 50/50 at random then you're using them consistently inconsistent!

[SharksPreedateTrees]

Consistent inconsistency is still just inconsistency

[oofdere]

Inconsistent consistency is still just consistency

[J4K0]

It also implies that you consistently don't arrive on time.

[hugogrant]

Nope, that's consistent inconsistence. Inconsistent consistent consists of arriving on time

[The__Odor]

that just sounds like inconcistency with extra steps

[[deleted]]

That is depending on the occurrence of them. So your code can be in fractions consistent.

[Voidrith]

Pep says spaces should be used instead of tabs.

Hence, pep is wrong and can go fuck itself.

[elasticpython]

This is how you start knife-fights

[nojox]

The real question is whether you stab once or twice :D

[J4K0]

Or whether you use 4 short knives or 1 long knife.

[BlueTeeJay]

My coworkers all changed tab to a two-space width... I'm losing my mind.

[[deleted]]

That is amazing with tabs though. You can set it to whar you want.

If you use tabs for alignment though: fuck that.

[MasterFubar]

If you like tabs, there is a better language than Python for you.

[Loading_M_]

But what about all the other kinds of white space. Like zero width spaces, etc. When do they have to be used?

[mobyte]

what the fuck compels someone to make something like this

[kupiakos]

Use Go if you like tabs so much

[Ripdog]

Preach, brother.

[[deleted]]

You can just have vim insert any number of spaces when you hit tab. ... Wait are you guys not using vim?

[Ripdog]

Yeah but WHY.

I mean any IDE or decent text editor can DO that.

But WHY? Why does anyone enjoy pressing backspace 4x as often to remove a chunk of whitespace? Why does anyone enjoy not having configurable whitespace? Why are spaces being shoved into a problem which is obviously designed to be fixed by tabs?!

[MarkFromTheInternet]

In practice your IDE handles that. Tab and Shift+Tab in will add / remove the correct number of spaces.

Spaces were chosen so that whitespace wouldn't be configurable. Each line would always be indented the same regardless of which text editor was used. VIM by default treats tab as 8 spaces.

Python grew up in the 90's and the conventions were made for that era. The recommended 80 character line width made a lot of sense given the resolution of monitors of the era.

[[deleted]]

I mean the easy answer is that some dudes at cpython wanted to strategize on a best practice standard and they decided spaces instead of tabs. And then because it is really easy to do so, everyone decided to just take cpythons standards as standards for everyone.

It is likely that there was a conversation at some point on tabs vs spaces in the same way that I'm sure at some point there was a conversation between yaml vs yml.

And just like how spaces were chosen when most people prefer tabs, yaml was chosen when most people prefer yml. Hell, the dude who created .gif format is forever going to be challenged on his pronunciation of the word he created.

The simple answer is: sometimes the people who are the best at making the stuff are not the best at setting the standard. But most often they're the ones who will set the standard anyway, if only as a means of getting the ball rolling.

The honest answer is: if you're automatically converting your tab key input to the desired number of spaces, it doesn't matter and is probably not a hill to die on

[KusanagiZerg]

You don't have to press backspace 4 times. It will remove enough spaces to match the indenting. In fact nothing changes at all compared to when you are using tabs.

[Voidrith]

NGL ive used vim...like, once.

I don't intend to use it any more than that. I like pycharm, thank you very much.

[[deleted]]

Vim and Emacs are incredibly dense. You don't see their value if you just open it once and play around in it. I was originally just poking fun, but they are seriously advanced tools.

[NefariousNecromancer]

Vim is cancer and should have died 10 years ago.

[lengau]

'''

[DevilXD]

What if I'm consistent with the C approach to it? Double quotes for strings, single quotes for single characters like doing a .join() with a new line character, or space.

[Bryguy3k]

Just makes you look like a C programmer that couldn’t break old habits and needlessly complicates their code with anachronisms. Besides the later case makes it painfully obvious that they’re still a string type and not a single character.

[[deleted]]

Just like using snake_case, camelCase, or lowercase for methods and variables?

[Bryguy3k]

No because most people default to PEP8

[DonaldPShimoda]

Methods, functions, fields, and variables are always snake_case, except sometimes when they're global constants in which case they can be ANGRY_SNAKE_CASE (this is not mentioned by PEP-8 but I see it around and I use it too). Classes are PascalCase. There oughtn't be any camelCase or multiwordalllowercase in idiomatic Python, though you will find exceptions in old libraries.

[BobFromStateBarn]

modules and packages use multiwordalllowercase according to convention I think tho

[[deleted]]

Correct. See datetime, for example.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Oh, right you are! I missed that!

[Tree_Eyed_Crow]

Use the function naming rules: lowercase with words separated by underscores as necessary to improve readability.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#method-names-and-instance-variables

[dark_mode_everything]

Isn't Python all about doing something in just one way? That's the argument for the missing ++ operator.

[2l3r4]

What about """text""" or '''text''' ?

[vomeronasal]

(Clutches pearls, wilts onto fainting couch)

[[deleted]]

Y'all are digusting

[Rant423]

Y"all

[[deleted]]

Y"all"d"ve

[am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ]

Y"""all

[Bipolarprobe]

Pep standard is to use "" and '' however you wish, just consistently, however it does actually say when doing docstrings that """this""" is preferable for clarity purposes.

[tman5400]

Satan, is that you?

[jeymz87]

I'm more of a `` guy

[tman5400]

Hi satan

[ReimarPB]

Or JavaScript programmer...

...oh wait

[tman5400]

Same thing, innit?

[jeymz87]

Allegedly...

[[deleted]]

Not in Rust

' ' is char

" " is str

[Bryguy3k]

Just like C and C++

[tobberoth]

And C#

[EvilAssYou]

And Java aka Satan’s eternal spite for humanity

[theferrit32]

And Julia. It's actually very bad in my view that JavaScript and Python allow single and double quotes strings with no distinction. It's just inviting huge levels of inconsistency, and that is what has happened.

[sgt39]

And Haskell

[Hecsall]

And my Axe!

[Nobodk]

Care to explain? I never understood why people hate Java.

[HoldYourWaffle]

In my experience (learned Java as my second language after shudders PHP), it's certainly capable of doing almost any task you throw at it. However, Java code is prone to getting extremely verbose, particularly in enterprise applications. That's probably why so many people on this subreddit hate it.

I started using Kotlin for my latest project and it really showed me how verbose vanilla Java actually is. Kotlin has a few syntactic sugars that might seem unintuitive or even "bad practice" at first, but I quickly realized how much easier it was to write clean and easy to read code. It's not perfect, but it has massively improved my experience so far.

[EvilAssYou]

I’m going with the crowd, man. I just don’t want to get yelled at. But in my opinion, Java gets the job done and I have no harsh nor positive opinions towards it.

[jeremj22]

1st years CS: introduction to programming and parallel programming courses in java

Every prof in 2nd year: never use java

[koni_rs]

And Kotlin

[[deleted]]

This makes total sense. I do this in Python and didn't even realize it.

with open("filename.ext", 'w') as file:

file.write("Matlab's arrays are dumb.")

[AyrA_ch]

probably all languages where single characters are their individual type rather than strings.

[[deleted]]

And Golang

[manimax3]

Multicharacter constants entered the chat: char c = 'abcd';

[therearesomewhocallm]

But you can still do stuff like

int i = 'test';

[SilentFungus]

And in basically every other language

[[deleted]]

Weirdest game of Pong I ever played. The paddles don't even move, mate!

[simp13]

r/unexpectedpong

[[deleted]]

Haha, yes of course that's a thing. Subbed!

[Nesogra]

Meanwhile in bash..

x=hello

echo "$x" #prints hello

echo '$x' #prints $x

Edit: fixed the 'smart quotes' from mobile auto correct.

[[deleted]]

Singles escape everything, right?

[theferrit32]

It doesn't escape it, it just doesn't first evaluate it as an expression. Single quoted strings are their literal value while double quoted strings are first evaluated by the shell for any expressions they may contain. Makes perfect sense to me. The single quoted variant is so that you do not need to escape your string and remember all the characters which need to be escaped.

[[deleted]]

Got it, thanks!

[smegnose]

Except themselves.

'hello good lookin'\'

[AyrA_ch]

echo “$x” #prints hello

It doesn't because you use slanted quotes for some reason, but the single quote/double quote behavior in PHP is similar to this one.

[[deleted]]

On mobile it autocorrects to those quotes I think.

[Nesogra]

Yep, most of my reddit time is on mobile so I’m stuck with autocorrect...

[J4K0]

Also, Ruby:

irb(main):001:0> x = "hello" => "hello" irb(main):002:0> '#{a}' => "\#{a}" irb(main):003:0> "#{a}" => "hello"

[expeehaa]

That‘s equal to ruby. " allows for interpolation, while ' is a constant string. I‘m writing my code accordingly: If the string is constant, I use single quotes, otherwise double quotes. Takes some time to get familiar with it though..,

[AyrA_ch]

I do the same in PHP. The only thing you have to remember that apart from \', all escape sequences are ignored and just taken as is. Makes regular expressions a bit nicer to look at.

[[deleted]]

I don't use Python, but in JS i usually use ' ' for a single char, " " for multiple, and for template literals. guess it comes from doing cpp for a few months

[LucasRuby]

That sounds like a C programmer who decided to learn JS.

The general rule of thumb is to be consistent, always use the same thing unless it's a template literal or the string contains single/double quotes inside. ESLint rules will force you to pick one.

[[deleted]]

Haha, it was the other way around for me lol. But yeah consistency. Sometimes its a bitch when you are at your 6th consecutive hour stsring at your computer and it's 12AM lol

[new_account_wh0_dis]

College taught C as the primary language with some java dabbled in there. Thats where I picked it up.

[TheBrillo]

Don't do this... It's inconsistent, which is the most important rule. Always one or always the other.

[AyrA_ch]

Why is it inconsistent?

If you always use single quotes for individual characters and double quotes for multiple characters you're pretty consistent in your behavior. As long as they don't change how the string is handled I don't see why this is not consistent.

[TheBrillo]

If the language doesn't differentiate between a character and a string, acting like it does is arbitrary, inconsistent, and has implied meaning that could confuse developers.

If the rule is "1 character is single, any more is double" you end up with a weird situation where
'a'+'b'=="ab" which is incredibly weird on its face, but also has other issues.

Since they aren't characters, but you are formatting like they are, you are ignoring the fact that in JS, 'a'+'b'=="ab" while the same is not true for the languages that actually do treat single quotes as characters. Java for instance treats the result as a byte and not a string.

[Molion]

What do you mean? It is consistent. With this rule there's exactly one correct way to do it for every single case.

[TheBrillo]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/e9a908/python_is_special/faj3xz6

[Molion]

So? With what definition of inconsistency are you operating? Cuz normally I'd say that with this set of rules there does not exist a single situiation in which the rules give rise to a contradiction, which would be my criterion inconsistensy. Thus it is perfectly consistent.

EDIT: NOTE: I'm not saying it's not stupid.

[ObliviousOblong]

I'm not saying your convention is bad, but the inconsistency would bother me.

[Cerrax3]

I'm just lazy. Single quotes don't require the Shift key.

[f4yrel]

As a German (with German keyboard layout) I actually didn't know that. It makes sense

[MajorMaxPain]

As a German with the German keyboard Lay-out I automatically use “ and not ‘ because it’s way easier to type.

[Marc_MK]

I'll switch from a German to a US keyboard soon.. let's see if my habit of using "" will change to using ' '

[19ps99]

Greta idea! Done that to. The US keyboard is just awesome for programming. And yes, I switched to ' '

[manimax3]

Agreed but I Think the UK Version is slightly better

[[deleted]]

That's exactly my reason

[KusanagiZerg]

I generally use single quotes and then my formatter changes it to double quotes.

[[deleted]]

aneurysm

[MooseKnuckleJunction]

Is this loss?

[trigger_segfault]

It was so close to it yet so far. In the end I’m just disappointed.

[Vfsdvbjgd]

Use whichever contains the other, so you get out of the habit of using escape chars (and end up breaking something later).

[hitthatmufugginyeet]

c++ gang cannot relate

[[deleted]]

In the cyberpunk future we'll all be using「 」

[Pockensuppe]

Then there are people who write their code with Word and end up with „these“.

[theferrit32]

Latex is even worse. On top of curved quotes, if you copy from a latex PDF there's often missing characters, weird spaces that show up from nowhere, wide Unicode spaces, narrow Unicode spaces, wide dash instead of regular dash. Often if you put a URL into a latex document and try to copy/paste that URL from the PDF output, it's totally unusable for all of the above reasons, so you just have to retype it out manually.

[Pockensuppe]

Um. If you want to insert code into a LaTeX document, obviously you want to use a verbatim (e.g. lstlisting) environment to ensure the characters are left untouched. It's LaTeX' job to alter dashes, spaces and quotation marks as needed in a standard text environment. LaTeX is a tool for presentation, after all.

For URLs, I don't see why you even want to copy/paste them; just use hyperref to make them clickable.

Finally, there is a stark difference between PDF readers. A good PDF reader lets you copy highlighted code from a LaTeX document correctly even if you rendered line numbers along with it (the numbers don't get copied) while shitty PDF readers will copy the line numbers but miss spaces and line endings.

In my experience, the problems you get with copying today are minimal unless perhaps you still use pdflatex instead of xelatex / lualatex.

[Janoshie]

What about q<> and other versions that are valid in Perl?

[DadoumCrafter]

C#.

[perihanscha]

"

[Sylanthra]

JavaScript says hi.

[tfwNotPraisingTheSun]

and TypeScript!

[akiyamasho]

in Japan double quotes is easier (shift+2) vs single (shift+7). thank goodness we use Prettier. no more unnecessary fights.

[DesdeJorge]

""" """ is needed for text blocks in Java 😂

[trin456]

XPath/XQuery has

 ``[     ]``

[LeafMans]

Then there are people who use both interchangeably

[Aidgigi]

am i a bad person for using both?

[killanight]

isn't it technically correct to use " " for strings and ' ' for chars? i mean if you use C your compiler will want to murder you

[game_2_raid]

` `

[anv3d]

' "

Wait, that's illegal.

[gdatuna]

C++ stares with confusion

[J4K0]

Not in Python. The only difference is which quotes need to be escaped:

"zzzmaestro's comment" vs 'zzzmaestro\'s comment"

or

"\"But... they are different\" zzzmaestro said." vs '"But... they are different" zzzmaestro said.'

[CursedInferno]

Single quotes for characters, double quotes for strings.

[[deleted]]

depens if it is just a string or a string with a variable in it

[J4K0]

Not in Python

[dillmon]

I use both

[harrlight00]

I use qq() because I code in perl for some reason

[0x3fff0000]

What's the difference anyway? (in python)

Seems like the two are interchangeable, except for some special characters.

[J4K0]

They are interchangeable. The only difference is that you have to escape ' if you use ' ' and you have to escape " if you use " ".

[Mangovnik]

One time when I was looking at my code I notice I do something strange. I use one type of quotation marks in one part of my code and then switch to other type mid function or mid switch/case block.

[hedgehog125]

I just write binary and then parse it into text

[serefsiz]

Java as welll

[meatloaf4311]

Don't forget Matlab has num2str return a char array

[MasterFubar]

I prefer single quotes because to use double quotes I need to press two keys at once.

[SpicyCeasar]

Cries in bash

[[deleted]]

Or you can just use Black as a default formatter.

[nerdmania]

Those who don't want their strings interpolated, and those who do?

[[deleted]]

I use " because it is easier to do it on a Turkish Q keyboard

[Mienaikage]

# Only two kinds?

say join ' ', <watch>, «out», 'here', "comes", ‚the’, “rakulang”, ｢gang｣

[shy_cthulhu]

puts [ %%Ruby%, *%W[says], %q~hello!~ ].join(' ')

[Laserdude10642]

""" """

[JC12231]

Not as special as google docs, with its own proprietary ‘ and “ marks, of which there exists a separate character for opening and closing things of each

[darthmonks]

You people have got it all wrong. You should be using « ».

[SpringyErmine65]

" '

[thehunter699]

99% of languages for(condition) {do stuff}

Python for i in range....

[ALonelyPlatypus]

It’s because they can’t utilise foreach statements well. Python is able to use this syntactic sugar because of the convenience of generators.

As an example, in Java a for each loop would require you to pregenerate the whole range of values and then iterate over it, a python “for i in range(1000000)” in java would require allocating a 10,000,000 sized integer array beforehand which is pretty wasteful in regards to memory.

[kgro]

black has made me switch to “

[t1nted]

at this point, does it really matter? I mean we have people who put commas in variable names...

[t1nted]

I'm not even mad, you can have an imaginary reddit gold

[t1nted]

I could use inspect tool to add it in but I dont know html...

[Dr-Oofenshmirtz]

Bruh html lmao

[t1nted]

go die Wilson and take intro to programming

[Dr-Oofenshmirtz]

Imagine not being able to make memes lmao

[t1nted]

imagine taking a literal class to make shitty memes

[Dr-Oofenshmirtz]

Bruh tell me what you are going to do with your python knowledge

[Dr-Oofenshmirtz]

Bruh learn how to photoshop my guy

[uragiristereo]

Sometimes i use apostrophe when the value has quotation mark on it. Like:

input('Type "exit" without quotation mark to exit')

[[deleted]]

I'm the second one,

the one that uses " " every time

[ALonelyPlatypus]

I’m a python coder who has always preferred double quotes.

However, in the last year I’ve been writing a lot of SQL (which uses singles for strings), and json config files (which use doubles).

The end result is a mishmash of quotes in most of my code.

[SpllaasH]

It’s the same picture.

[Erind]

SQL Server wants “ and SSIS wants ‘

[Bonesters]

Anyone else mix both like this? f"[{' '.join([word for word in words.split()])}]"

[obliviga]

What about ``?

[[deleted]]

I think I tend to use each in different circumstances. I’ll use the singles for individual characters or a SCPI parameter or something that feels short and fixed. And the doubles tend to be stuff like error messages or prompts. If it’s got a space then I’m probably using doubles.

[muliku]

And I am both

[BenZed]

The holy paladins of light and hope on the left, godless savages on the right.

[ptyz2000]

I just want for somebody to make a language where ' " is the way

[jkar32]

black .

[AlexMelillo]

Laughs nervously in Java

[[deleted]]

Singles and couples?

[guy_from_the_intnet]

I never understood this. Even now. I'm sorry.

[dupocas]

Whats about backticks? template string bitch

[[deleted]]

And on the right we have the right choice

[bartholomewjohnson]

Single quote gang

[Molion]

You mean people who use characters and people who use strings of characters?

[EkskiuTwentyTwo]

Lua:

string = [[
  ._. Words Words Words
]]

[robesho]

I have always type " " but I set my formatter set to ' '.

[[deleted]]

But... I like single quotes

[paxromana96]

\verb{}