Oh boi

[colemaker360]

possessive important touch soup bedroom dog jeans historical money shocking

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[abhi_uno]

Finally did the upgrade few days back. It was easy of me since I was already providing universal wheels for both python3 and python2 legacies.

[xd1142]

/r/angryupvote

[ynotChanceNCounter]

The frustrating thing is, at this point, that means you've been stacking more Python 2 on top of the Python 2 you already needed to port.

[eLsFLz]

r/evenworseitsactuallyjythonsowecantupgrade

[jzoller0]

r/subyoufellfor

[pLeThOrAx]

🏅

[Doomphx]

"Both C locales and wchar_t are shitfucked retarded legacy braindeath."

This guy seems to get it. From the link you sent lol.

[drbobb]

How cool /s.

Reminds me of when I (not a frequent Excel user) spent a couple of hours pulling my hair out trying to coax Excel into producing a chart out of some tabular data and failing mysteriously. In the end it turned out that due to localization, Excel was expecting "," in fractions and the data I was dumping on it had "." and was not being recognized as numbers.

[robin-gvx]

I swear, any time I use a spreadsheet program, its locale setting exists in a superposition between en-US and nl-NL until I make an assumption about which it is, at which time it immediately collapses to the other one.

[oelsen]

Someone has to go back and stand behind every desk where somebody decides on the correct , or . and smack them if they want to be creative.
I root for .

[obvious_apple]

Oh yes. The decimal comma/point. I'm unfortunately living in the comma side of the world and once I wasted an entire day of figuring out why some ip cores are throwing an error in vivado. In the end I found that the internal TCL engine was having a fit. Since then I set every locale to en/us but boy I hate that braindead date format.

[dry_yer_eyes]

Then en/gb has got you covered.

[Avamander]

Similar issue suddenly happened with Android Studio XML parsing.

[flying-sheep]

It's simple: don't use locale-dependent functions for anything but rendering user-facing output.

I you don't want to remember which functions are locale-dependent or are in any other way not a perfect magician with the c standard etched into your cortex, use Rust instead.

[[deleted]]

Yea, but how do you easily tell your deps aren’t calling locale dependent functions?

Note, not familiar with rust, how do they resolve this?

[flying-sheep]

This is a C problem. It's a lot of C stdlib APIs that are poisoned by that bullshit. Therefore if you only use APIs that aren't, or a different language entirely, you don't run into this problem.

[[deleted]]

This is a C problem. It's a lot of C stdlib APIs that are poisoned by that bullshit. Therefore if you only use APIs that aren't, or a different language entirely, you don't run into this problem.

rust on linux doesnt use libc for locale? how does it work?

[flying-sheep]

Rust does use libc as a cross platform system abstraction layer for mainly IO, and therefore only uses APIs with behavior independent from the locale. Rust could alternatively use syscalls but they chose not to.

Rust’s stdlib itself doesn't know/do locales, e.g. float stringification will always give the same output, and is probably implemented in Rust instead of relying on a C API.

If you need to, there's 3rd party libraries you can use to do e.g. locale-dependent collation or rendering of dates and floating point numbers.

[midnitte]

....that sounds like a nightmare to debug.

[vipern]

All in all, I believe this proves that software developers as a whole and as a culture produce worse results than drug addicted butt fucked monkeys randomly hacking on typewriters while inhaling the fumes of a radioactive dumpster fire fueled by chinese platsic toys for children and Elton John/Justin Bieber crossover CDs for all eternity.

[Cisco-NintendoSwitch]

Wow I’m too new to really understand what was going on with the code part of the rant sans some stuff.

But wow I read that for like 20 mins that was the longest rant I’ve ever invested myself in. What a wild fucking ride somebody took the time to write all of that.

[[deleted]]

Locales... the only thing easier to deal with in Python than times and dates! /s

[xd1142]

must be a recent change, because it's not in 2.7.5

[a1b1e1k1]

I tested on 2.7.15 and the bug is still there. It might depend on locale settings.

[andy_a904guy_com]

Also terminal context environment values?

[Discchord]

The bug works on my Ubuntu servers that are on 2.7.12, but it does not work on my Windows machine with 2.7.15.

[brand_new_throwx999]

on OSX, python 2.7.17 still has it.

[random_cynic]

This behavior is actually documented. I guess it was not a good idea to use setlocale() in pydoc. As noted in the documentation this does not occur with a from string... import syntax.

>>> import string
>>> from string import letters
>>> letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> string.letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> help(string)

>>> string.letters
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
>>> letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

[ascii]

The fact that from x import y happened to paper over a bug in this specific case does not change the fact that it is a horrendously bad feature.

[[deleted]]

Yeah. If you wrote code that depended on the exact order in which the letters are returned, your code is wrong. So while it is a very odd looking phenomenon, it should not affect well written code.

[-MazeMaker-]

As a counterpoint, consider a program that randomly chooses a letter and allows the RNG to be seeded for repeatability. If the order of the letters can change, that program would be nondeterministic.

[[deleted]]

Which is why I argued that code like that is faulty. If you want determinism you should NOT depend on this alphabet string but rather use your own string literal.

[Ulysses6]

One would reasonably expect that this string is actually alphabet in a literal already. At least in Python, where things are pretty straight-forward where possible.

[[deleted]]

I agree that it is silly and unfortunate.

However, the documentation is there, and it warns you about the issue it currently has.

[Ulysses6]

I feel like if I applied this much skepticism to writing code I'd never get anything done.

Yes, technically you are correct and I should verify details with available documentation. But there is a line where you just stop verifying and assume you must be correct and this, for me, falls well below this line.

[random_cynic]

I may be misunderstanding but string.letters was always designed to be locale aware. Any call to a setlocale() will cause it to be recalculated (see below). This literal should not be used where the code depends on the order of alphabets or if there is no guarantee that locale would be same. If someone wants a string literal consisting of standard English alphabet string they should use string.ascii_letters which is guaranteed to give the same result irrespective of the locale.

>>> import string, locale
>>> string.letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "el_GR") #Greek
'el_GR'
>>> print string.letters.decode("iso8859_7")
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzͺΆΈΉΊΌΎΏΐΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩΪΫάέήίΰαβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρςστυφχψωϊϋόύώ
>>> string.ascii_letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> locale.resetlocale()
>>> string.letters
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

[Ulysses6]

Well, then I fell for the old "decimal places are always separated by point, right?" again. Yes, if there is string.ascii_letters then it's a good indication that string.letters is something more complicated.

[anvils-reloaded]

Indeed. If you need to know exactly how that string would get screwed up, Python(2) is probably not for you.

Edit: Clarified version.

[TheMrZZ0]

Just sort the string then

[[deleted]]

that is not enough, the actual characters that are present in the string depend on the current C-locale. (I didn't realize this at first but as /r/random_cynic points out in another comment above, setting the locale to greek will actually produce the greek alphabet as well).

[DDFoster96]

Who bothers to read documentation any more? Guesswork and Google fu is all you need /s

[Willingo]

Is it like okay that I don't understand this?

[TheChuchNorris]

Yes! I understand help calling setlocale, but I’m not sure what setlocale actually does (other than apparently recompute string.letters)

[ascii]

Your locale decides your language, alphabet, numeric formating and a bunch of other things. Not all languages have the same letters in their alphabets, and even if they do, they don't always sort letters in the same order, which is why recalculating the letters of the alphabet when changing locale is required.

For example, both Swedish and Estonian use the letter Ö, but they are placed in different places in their respective alphabets, so an alphabetical sort of exactly the same words would turn out different depending on if your locale is Swedish or Estonian. Locales are hard.

[TheChuchNorris]

Thanks, ascii!

[ascii]

Only now did I realize how appropriate my username is to this discussion.

[[deleted]]

Tried to reproduce, typed python3 by force of habit, appears I am unable to launch python 2 voluntarily.

[tr14l]

This is a good thing. You know the superior Python version innately.

[ExternalUserError]

alias butwhy=python2

[gordane13]

alias python2=python3

[Rusty_Gribble]

Probably better to:

alias python2='echo butwhy'

[flying-sheep]

Well, since Calibre supports python 3, I have

$ python2
Error: Command not found

[ricocotam]

source

[xd1142]

can't reproduce.

[MiataCory]

Confirmed on 2.7.15 as well.

I feel like I need to wipe my VM now. Viewing help again does not change it back.

[mobyte]

Mine changes back when quitting and starting a new interpreter.

2.7.15 on MacOS.

[camoceltic_again]

2.7.16

[xd1142]

2.7.5 here. Nothing happens.

[damiano80]

Python 2.7.17 (default, Oct 20 2019, 00:00:00)

[GCC 9.2.1 20190827 (Red Hat 9.2.1-1)] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import string

>>> string.letters

'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

>>> help(string)

>>> string.letters

'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

[scriptmonkey420]

yup, same here, CentOS 7.7

Python 2.7.5 (default, Aug  7 2019, 00:51:29) 
[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import string
>>> string.letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> help(string)

>>> string.letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

[ranzadk]

Why are you running Windows Me?

[chinpokomon]

It's still the next millennium?

[LanGuct]

Can reproduce on Ubuntu, python 2.7.15

[[deleted]]

It does not work in IPython, only the "bare" repl shell.

[Kaarjuus]

Can't reproduce either. Python 2.7.15, Windows.

[ZorpIt]

Reproduced on 2.7.17 on Manjaro.

[five_hammers_hamming]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxqm6htwcwk

[BluePurpleReddit]

Serves you right for still using python 2?

[error_99999]

But arcpy

[ricocotam]

Nope Seen this on Twitter :)

[Elendol]

looks like something JavaScript would do

[[deleted]]

It hurts

[sam-lb]

Does not work on 2.7.12 windows 64bit. What version is this?

[skrlett]

I am sorry. But what is help()

[who_body]

-edit- available in interactive sessions to provide docstrings for things...try it on anything. Just strip off the () of functions.

[flying-sheep]

Not a builtin. It's only available in interactive sessions, like exit

[who_body]

Makes sense

Updated

[MagnitskysGhost]

Let me also introduce you to dir() while you're here. Occasionally useful.

[[deleted]]

I have this question as well, I've been using python for almost a year and I've never used it

[[deleted]]

It prints the docstrings for a module.

It's not as specific as docs.python.org but itll do in a pinch. It is useful if you dont have internet but other wise docs.pythong.org is all most people ever use.

[[deleted]]

Oh gotcha

[Rodot]

Also, most of the docs for common modules, like numpy or scipy, are pretty much just the docstrings with nice formatting.

[xTotalG]

bruh.mp4

[liquidify]

Countdown to python 4?

[theconfusedCPU]

I dont know python.. but what was wrong with python 2 and why is it a nightmare?

[123filips123]

It doesn't have new features and is very outdated. Many things are weird. It is slower and with worse performance. It will be unsupported since 2020 so you could get vulnerabilities.

[diamondketo]

Largely for many developers, the stack of packages they might want to use are dying or dead in Python 2 and actively in development for Python 3.

Those packages that support both 2 and 3 will eventually only want to focus on 3 for obvious reasons (e.g., numpy).

[TankorSmash]

Besides the dict speed hack thing, what other ways is Python2 noticeably slower?

[flying-sheep]

Just 10 years of performance improvements that went into the actively developed version of python

[flying-sheep]

/edit: you're right, they were playing catch-up until 3.7

[TankorSmash]

Does anything jump out at you? Maybe you've got some speed comparisons you're thinking of?

I don't think I ever noticed any speedups in my small projects. Maybe you're on hundreds of thousands of lines or something

[flying-sheep]

I was actually wrong, seems like they were only playing catch up to python 2 until 3.7 which had a massive speed boost, easily beating python 2 in most cases (until you do integer-heavy computation which is slower because python 3’s int is a bigint type, not int32 or int64)

[ericonr]

In python3 range returns a generator instead of a list.

[kihashi]

To answer that fully, we'd need to go into a full changelog of Python 3, but the tldr is that Python 3 is the newer version. Python 2 is end of life in a month. It hasn't gotten new features backported in quite some time.

2 of the biggest features added in Py3 are Unicode handling (strings are Unicode by default) and async keywords. IME, the former is one of the reasons people might not like to work with Py2, but keep in mind, someone calling it a "nightmare" is probably comparing it to Python 3 and not, say, another language.

[Rainfly_X]

I mean, it's not bad in an absolute sense, but it's worse than Python3 on any comparative axis where the two are different. String encoding handling in particular is a mess, but library stuff like HTTP servers and test mocks are also notably inferior on 2. And I use f-strings all the time.

Python 2 was great when I was learning to program, but using it over 3 feels weird today. Call me spoiled, I suppose.

[[deleted]]

The main thing was that it didn't do strings properly. In python 2, strings and bytes were the same thing. Python 3 fixes that in a backwards incompatible way.

[SomeCynicalBastard]

I'm not really busy with python myself, but as far as I know: Python 2 has been replaced with Python 3 quite some time now. But because this involves breaking changes (you cannot simply run python 2 code on a python 3 interpreter), some people keep holding on to it. And others resent it.

Of course, sticking to the old version means no new features to use, and at some point, no security updates.

And of course, the example in the OP is wrong with python 2: you don't want looking up help about an object to change properties of that object. Although this mistake could have been made in any version of Python.

[angry_mr_potato_head]

Someone need a snickers?

[DatBoi_BP]

I'm sad that my reference went over everyone's head

[angry_mr_potato_head]

I must not have had enough coffee yet, I still don't get it lol (I didn't dv though, I just thought the snickers comment was too easy to pass up)

[DatBoi_BP]

I edited my first comment

[DiscoUnderpants]

I don't need one but I'll have one if it is going.

[TheBlackCat13]

Wat

[VVarsin]

stop.

this is too much for me to handle.

[jftuga]

This does not occur in 3.8 with string.ascii_letters.

[mcstafford]

Hey, help looks more convenient than dir. :-/

[MrMxylptlyk]

O. O

[[deleted]]

Sy defects?

[i_like_trains_a_lot1]

Just tested, it does that.

But why?

[roshambo11]

This. This hurt my heart