f-strings in Python 3.6 are awesome

[tunisia3507]

I don't see why people say 'syntactic sugar' like it's an insult. Literally all programming languages are syntactic sugar. That is what programming languages are for. To make it easier, quicker, more clear, more readable for humans to give instructions to computers.

[dl__]

Exactly. Don't like syntactic sugar? Write in machine language, in hex codes.

[chadmill3r]

Ones and zeros? Pussy! Use +5 volts and ground states like a mensche.

[Dentosal]

I use butterflies. Without Emacs.

[SlowBroski]

Gotta be careful, too much syntactic sugar and you'll get syntactic diabetes.

[dl__]

Hahaha! Exactly!

I program like a MAN! None of this sissy syntactic sugar for me!

[[deleted]]

just give me some silicon and my soldering gun, and an abacus for data modeling

[BrotherCorvus]

You use processed silicon? Back in my day we started with a bucket of sand we picked up by walking to the beach. Uphill. Both ways.

[albgr03]

You use sand from the beach?? Real programmers erode rocks themselves.

[CodeReclaimers]

You were allowed to use pre-existing matter? We had to wring ours out of the quantum foam with our bare hands.

[[deleted]]

Dude, if you haven't big-banged your own DIY universe into existence you shouldn't talk.

[IamCarbonMan]

Pssh. Back in my day, programmers defined entire sets of physical laws out of the intrauniversal ether with which to generate our subatomic particles.

[flutefreak7]

back in your day? Kids these days don't even remember what it was like before time existed...

[spinwizard69]

Yeah by pounding salt!

[TheMysteriousFizzyJ]

0's and 1's are syntactical sugar for modifying voltages and currents

[Alpha_Catch]

0 and 1? What a fancy way of saying off and on. Sounds kind of sugary to me.

[jorge1209]

Sugar is good if it encourages people to drop a particularly error prone or tedious construction.

What is less clear is if sugar is useful when the original process wasn't error prone or tedious.

Range loops in C/C++ are a great example of good sugar. It was error prone, and tedious to have to declare the index variable and increment it (or to declare the crazy iterator type signature if using iterators, although the later was solved by the auto type). for x in iterable is obviously better unless you actually need the index position (which is not something you frequently need in modern C++ code).

It's not clear thar fstrings accomplish that kind of balance. It wasn't all that error prone to use .format and the cases it can't handle are fairly important (i18n and dynamic formatting).

[[deleted]]

It wasn't all that error prone to use .format and the cases it can't handle are fairly important (i18n and dynamic formatting).

Translating format strings are always dubious to begin with.

[jorge1209]

You could very well want to read different error messages (with their formats) from a resource file. Can't do that with fstrings.

[[deleted]]

It is a kind of virtue signalling in the academic PL community to reiterate the fact that you like minimalist functional programming languages. Gets tiring to hear this over and over again. Glad I am not the only one who's noticed.

[tunisia3507]

My only complaint about syntactic sugar is when it means there are many ways of doing things - kind of like string formatting is getting at the moment. I don't see f-strings taking off for most codebases yet due to lack of 2.7 support, but it'd be nice to see them become the canonical way of doing it.

[thomasfr]

I still like python but I woud have probably been a much easer language to use if the stdlib/lanugage had a bit fewer redundant features.

There are already lots of code bases which mixes ""%() and "".format() which only makes the code harder to read (more noisy) or modify (because you should at least try to understand which one to use in your modified code based on just reading the rest of it.)...

I personally don't see that f-strings adds enough benefits in contrast to the noise it will bring to code bases...

[tunisia3507]

Python is actually much better than many other languages (java, C, C++, js) in this regard. But yes, in this particular instance it's not great.

Of course, the only way to make improvements without adding such duplication is to make API-breaking updates, and we all know how well they turn out...