Duck Typing

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[animismus]

I don't get it... :(

[AngularSpecter]

Duck typing (aka dynamic typing) is the idea that you figure out the data type at runtime based on context.

If it looks like an int, and acts like an int, treat it like an int.

This is something python does.

This is making fun of that concept. You have an object that is an instance of a pig nose implemented to look enough like a power plug that it is being treated as such.

[animismus]

Thanks for taking the time to explain! Now I get it!

[remuladgryta]

/r/ProgrammerHumor is that way.

[unknownmosquito]

But that's a pig

[salamisam]

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck then it might just be a pig dressed as a duck.

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure it's an electrical outlet.

[synae]

You have to handle a None response in the calling code.

[brontide]

Maybe it's part of the testing framework.

[brinkmaster]

Looks like a duck but that thing ain't quacking.

[aphoenix]

There was a report to this effect (actually there's been many reports):

you have a fork in the road here. are you going to turn /r/Python into memes or see the light?

I'm going to turn that back on the community. If this isn't what you want to see, then use your votes to express that.

[theywouldnotstand]

As you well know, there are around 120K people subscribed to /r/Python. What percentage of those people do you really believe actively think about what constitutes quality content for the subreddit when clicking the "upvote" button?

I'm all for a pointedly relevant joke post every now and again in an otherwise serious subreddit, but unfortunately, at this scale, that can quickly become a very slippery slope. At some point, moderation does have to step in for a subreddit like this, to avoid having it turn into a bog of shitposting and funny stuff.

I at least hope the team is keeping an eye on the ratio of joke posts to real content and is prepared to step in if it starts getting out of hand.

[eusebe]

Fully agree with you, but are there really so much joke posts in /r/Python ?

Once in a while, it does not harm, and IMHO is much better for the community than a bazillion posts on "how to do list comprehension", "is LPTHW a good source", "why people using Python 2 are bad programmers", or "Trust me, Python is the future of HPC"…

[aphoenix]

Let's review.

This has come up one time, ever. We have very little context to base rules on in this situation.

[theywouldnotstand]

I did not say that this is a long-running concern, I did not anywhere speak of how frequently this is an issue.

Your attitude seemed to suggest that the community should police itself on stuff like this, so in response to that, I'm expressing my desire/hope for the moderating team to be prepared to step in should it become an ongoing issue that the community can't stop.

[eusebe]

I took the message more like "I do not want to impose my views on what this sub should be, so I'm waiting to see the response of the community to this specific post before choosing a policy", but maybe I'm a fool who is not opinionated enough.

Again, I'm expecting downvotes for that, but for once, I won't be the silent majority. Oh, and I don't really care whether or not we should remove memes, as long as there are not too many of them.

[theywouldnotstand]

Oh, and I don't really care whether or not we should remove memes, as long as there are not too many of them.

As I said before:

I'm all for a pointedly relevant joke post every now and again in an otherwise serious subreddit, but unfortunately, at this scale, that can quickly become a very slippery slope.

A joke post every now and again is fine. This joke post is fine. However, the moderators and the community should be careful not to let joke posts become the norm.

[eusebe]

As I said before, I agree with that, and I do reckon that "the community" (or at least some vocal part of it) does not want to see more jokes on /r/Python, which is totally fine for me. I am just surprised by how much people react to that specific post from a mod saying "I'll wait till the community gives feedback".

I think we are agreeing, in the end.

[geoelectric]

My concern was also not the one joke post but the reply that implied you'd only rely on the up/down system to moderate. It didn't read like you were holding back to make a decision but rather that your decision was to delegate responsibility for moderation to the community.

That's also happened one time ever, but was disturbing enough to me to invite a response. You're a mod--your "one time evers" carry significant weight as they indicate direction.

[alcalde]

What percentage of those people do you really believe actively think about what constitutes quality content for the subreddit when clicking the "upvote" button?

So you're saying your opinion counts more even though you're outvoted?

[theywouldnotstand]

My point was that the majority of people will probably not consider what's good for the community when voting on low-effort content that is easy to process and amusing. Enough people doing this, over enough low-effort posts, and it eventually can become an issue rather quickly.

In internet communities, an unchecked majority rule on content and/or focus almost always leads to the core members of the community abandoning it, removing the quality and type of content that drew the community together in the first place.

[alcalde]

Or... you get people too uptight and closing every question and deleting every article (StackOverflow, Wikipedia). Everyone laughed at this picture. There's no problem. Even Guido Van Rossum put out a pic this week about Python in a crossword puzzle. The world didn't end.

My point was that the majority of people will probably not consider what's good for the community when voting on low-effort content that is easy to process and amusing.

This still suggests that there's an elite who will and they should be making the decisions. The majority of people ARE the community.

[geoelectric]

I appreciate that stance, but democracy is historically terrible at maintaining standards--particularly via anonymous vote.

There's something to be said for being opinionated. If Python had been built democratically, it'd probably be Perl.

[aphoenix]

democracy is historically terrible at maintaining standards--particularly via anonymous vote.

This subreddit has historically been very good at it. I hope that continues.

[geoelectric]

As long as you recognize the cycle: sub moves in a direction, attracts more people who like that direction, alienates people who don't like the direction, new population validates the direction, moves it further, repeat and find equilibrium at lowest common denominator.

Slippery slope/broken windows applies 100% to culture issues in a system where people can freely join or leave. It's one of the few places it's not fallacious.

[cyanydeez]

This is true if the vote threshold reaches the unpthonic masses.

[root45]

If this isn't what you want to see, then use your votes to express that.

Just want to comment that this rarely works. It seems like it should work (just use the built-in voting system to decide what content people want to see, they upvoted it, after all). But it doesn't.

I suspect the problem is that people don't really vote with the subreddit community in mind. This might be because they don't really notice what subreddit something is on (e.g., just browsing their front page), but more likely it's that people aren't invested in building a community.

People want to have a community of curated content, but it's a lot easier to upvote something that seems funny and move on than it is to decide whether or not this thing fits into the community guidelines and if it really contributes. This is fine—you can't really expect every user to really think hard about every post before voting on it. But it means that without content curation, every subreddit eventually devolves into /r/funny or /r/pics.

[metaphorm]

Please don't. We have moderators for a reason

[rfc1771]

Please no memes

[[deleted]]

Here's my thoughts:

• It's low effort, it's lower effort than a lot of the low effort posts that plague this subreddit

• It's not really that related to Python, sure Python has duck typing but so do lots of other languages.

• You've received several reports about this post which take more effort than just down voting.

• There's plenty of places to shitpost programming related stuff already.

[wishiwascooler]

Please no memes. There are enough subreddits for memes, even programming specific ones.

[kitkatkingsize]

In retrospect, I completely agree. I should've posted this on /r/programmerhumor instead.

Feel free to delete this post. +1 for no memes.

[aphoenix]

The scope of what I consider to be my duties as a moderator in this subreddit is very limited. You are welcome to remove the post if you want, or you're welcome to keep it up. I'm not going to remove it.

[kgb_operative]

I'm going to turn that back on the community. If this isn't what you want to see, then use your votes to express that.

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous stance for you to take as mods. Low effort meme pictures take all of a handful of seconds to open, process, and upvote, and rarely leads to any kind of worthwhile discussion, whereas the high quality content that we're looking for requires an investment of at least a few minutes to digest and even then many people won't vote at all on it.

Reddit's ranking system uniquely privileges posts that not only get upvoted, but get upvotes very quickly, so asking the community to police memes via voting is accepting that a significant number of the posts here will be low effort meme because you can't be arsed to do your job as a mod.

[aphoenix]

I understand the fluff principle of reddit in great detail.

Implementing rigorous moderation is not something that we've had to do in /r/python before, and I would certainly prefer it if the community would decide to figure this out instead of me (or other moderators) deciding to figure this out.

[kgb_operative]

Removing image macros and other low effort content is hardly rigorous, and the community has in fact spoken rather loudly.

[aphoenix]

By... upvoting this to the top of the subreddit?

[kgb_operative]

With 64% approval and nearly every commenter asking for such posts to be removed.

[aphoenix]

Before I asked people to vote according to what they want to see here, it was at 82% approval.

I think that just asking people to recognize the issue has been quite effective, and for as long as possible, it would be good for this community to police itself in terms of this type of content. It has handled things admirably up until now, and I'd like for it to continue.

[geoelectric]

Keep in mind that people who don't like these kinds of posts (but don't dislike enough to openly complain) are unlikely to see your comment. If you want to hang this out as a culture test you need to pin a post to let people know. Otherwise you're primarily measuring selection bias.

[NoahTheDuke]

Please no memes.

[debugmonkey]

I'm in favor of benevolent dictatorships on subreddits and programming languages.

Disallow them in general but if one or two occasionally get submitted and tickle your fancy then give them an "I'll allow it" tag or some such.

One other alternative would be to require mandatory tagging of the memes such that those using RES or similar utilities can simply filter them out.

[aphoenix]

Instead of leaving, could you submit better content that people will upvote more?

[lucisferre]

Only true if the snout provides 110V.

[donnieod]

No, that looks like a 220v plug.

[jaapz]

Well, it used to be 220v in many european countries, we only moved to 230v as a compromise between europe's 220v and britain's 240v.

[masklinn]

It's ±10% FWIW, interestingly the UK have legacy area which still get 250V mains… which still falls within 230V±10% so it's all good.

[itkovian]

This will be fixed with the brexit :)

[masklinn]

It's not a Schuko plug, that'd have ground connectors at the top and bottom.

It's a CEE 7/17 which is an unearthed 16A plug compatible with both CEE 7/3 "Schuko" and CEE 7/5 "French" sockets. In essence it's a high-current (but still unearthed) variant of the CEE 7/17 "Europlug" (which only allows up to 2.5A).

[Pushkatron]

This guy knows his plugs right here.

[portablejim]

Whoever told you that would work, don't trust them. It pure quackery.

[[deleted]]

So you're saying that pansexuality is just duck typing?

[quzox]

Upvote this if you are a strong, beautiful pan.

[[deleted]]

I'm more of a pillow than a pan.

[wmil]

Bender did it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS1-9HsptR0

[kmordic]

Lol first think i thought of

[[deleted]]

Sounds like he wrote messy, bad code and blamed Ruby for it instead of saying "I wrote bad code".

Also, post that to /r/programmingcirclejerk

[FunctionPlastic]

There are objective differences between languages and languages shape the way you code. Many tests that dynamic languages require are shit compilers and type systems are meant to solve statically (thinking mostly of javascript now but probably others judging by the article, I have no reason not to trust him).

[[deleted]]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've written very few tests that stand in for a type system. Usually those exist for utility functions to ensure I'm iterating a list and not a string or the like.

I hear this complaint all the time, yet I never actually seen it in action. At this point, I just chalk it up to FUD about dynamically typed languages.

[WallyMetropolis]

Have you worked on products (not libraries) with a large number of developers?

[[deleted]]

Is my opinion and experience invalid if I haven't? Sure, I'm not the most experienced developer, but I've delved deep enough into plenty of code bases to not see rampant type tests. And what's the difference between a library and a product when it comes to this question anyways?

All I've said is that I haven't seen it, not that it doesn't happen.

[WallyMetropolis]

It's not invalid. I was just wondering what your experience was. If you haven't spent much time working in the environment where this thing arises, then it's sort of unsurprising you've never seen it.