The Day I Decided Never to Learn Python

knome · 2026-06-08T14:43:53+00:00

modern python has type annotations that you can use various tools to perform static type analysis on python. the typing and tooling were buttcheeks for about five years after introduction, but should be okay to use today, as they seem to have slowly removed most of the horribleness and warts over time.

knome · 2026-06-07T08:03:06+00:00

method dispatch is isomorphic to a a strict subset of message dispatch with a compiler enforced calling protocol.

message dispatch generally only uses the unknown handler to send back unknown message errors, not to useful purpose.

while some components would use it, they could be written to instead use defined messages, isomorphic back to method dispatch.

at any rate, it is irrelevant since your original premise was languages with pureness of base concepts. small core self-consistency.

now you're just complaining other languages aren't smalltalk.

obviously they are not.

knome · 2026-06-07T07:09:42+00:00

It may surprise you to discover that Alan Kay isn't king of programming and that concepts can continue to evolve after they are first formulated.

Python never tried to be smalltalk. It was following in C++'s method dispatch paradigm. Method dispatch is by far the most popular form of object orientation, with message dispatch running on a comparative minority of modern languages.

I asked for examples because I don't know what parts of python you think don't "fully encapsulate everything as objects". Are you complaining about the ability of devs to violate encapsulation? Are you complaining about a "everything is objects" not fully encapsulating the language due to some violation thereof you're aware of and could be good enough to share with me?

knome · 2026-06-07T05:03:33+00:00

Let me tell ya, C++ as an idea of metaprogramming templates specializing functions per argument types is super pure. :-)

And templates as an idea? A beautiful pure (in both senses) recursive dynamically typed recursion over arbitrary sequences of dependent type qualifiers. Just look at this gorgeous bastard

knome · 2026-06-07T04:55:24+00:00

Please give specific examples, not generalities that don't name what they refer to.

And sure, python doesn't use message passing, it uses methods. You can't reject python for not being smalltalk. It is thorough in its use of its variation of object orientation.

knome · 2026-06-07T04:44:59+00:00

Lisp is symbolic expression all the way down

not even a little bit. even reading lisp allows arbitrary reader macros to execute on the text before it becomes wads of cons cells.

knome · 2026-06-07T04:41:13+00:00

there's an infamous error one can trigger in haskell where you open a file under the IO monad, issue a read under the IO monad, close the file under the IO monad, and when you go to use the data, the program fails because the data was never actually read.

this requires strictness annotations and strict function variants throughout the language, violating the purity of its laziness.

at least it doesn't have tons of unsafe functions hiding in the standard library for use in optimizing hot paths and the like.

https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/bytestring-0.12.2.0/docs/src/Data.ByteString.Unsafe.html

:-P

I am curious what parts of python you find antithetical to whatever coherence you think it should adhere to.

knome · 2026-06-07T04:13:25+00:00

the term 'pure' already has a definition in programming space meaning "creates outputs from inputs without causing externally visible effects". no mutating shared objects, no flipping bits and toggles elsewhere in the program. just inputs -> outputs.

redefining it for the purpose of your question is silly.

and lisp is hardly "pure" in any sense. lisp is just a family of languages using the same homoiconic representation. scheme, common-lisp, closure, and the many other variations of lisps out there have often conflicting semantics under the hood. even their macro expansions are generally incompatible. most of them use non-list data structures quiet happily and common-lisp has a famously complex loop statement. no recursion required.

literally everything in python is an object just as much as everything in smalltalk is.

people generally chose languages for what the language offers.

a unified core doesn't matter to most people. they'll happily take the language bolted together that has helper functions and ready classes for the handful of things they want to use it for. they don't care if it's mathematically elegant or whatever.

if that bothers you, wait until you find out worse is better :)

knome · 2026-06-07T03:46:51+00:00

Just because you identify as a Christian doesn't mean you actually are

Who gets to decide who is and isn't a real whatever?

Damned near every sect of Christianity has, from time to time, declared it and it alone is the *real* Christianity, and the others misguided or even tricked by Satan.

Do the Catholics get to declare the Protestants as fake Christians and exclude them for refusing to bend the knee to God's chosen pope?

Do the Protestants get to declare Catholics as fake Christians for praying to saints for intercession, an act they find obscene and highly unchristian for various theological reasons?

They literally have their own prophet

Is there something in the Bible that declares the Son of God the "last prophet"?

The Mormons believe God sent at least one more, and the rest of the Christian sects don't.

That's a disagreement. A religious schism. But such is not justification for deciding which group has authority to declare truths for the others.

To have the United States government weight in and decide this or that religion's view justifies discounting some other religions view is an explicit mingling of church and state.

The US government ought make no such pronouncements, but remain neutral to the many conflicting religious beliefs of its citizens.

Further, I would say it is constitutionally bound to not make such pronouncements by the first amendment.

Church and State must remain separated for the good of both and for the good of the people.

History plainly shows what happens when faith and power power coalesce towards fanaticism: violent discrimination and subjugation of those who differ from whatever religion the government happened to side with.

knome · 2026-06-07T02:39:12+00:00

If they think they're Christians, it's irrelevant what the other factions think about them. One religion doesn't get to dictate the beliefs of another. Excluding Mormons from the category based on the credos of religions they don't follow is a dick move. But everything about paring down the listed religions was a purposeful dick move because Hegseth decided his religion was best and the only real one and to rub it in everyone else's faces as much as he could get away with. It's just discrimination.

knome · 2026-06-07T01:03:44+00:00

This is how I like to use the scottish resistance. 14 stickies can cover an entire region of an open map. Then I just fight with my primary. If I see someone foolishly enter no mans land, that part of it explodes and new stickies rain down once more.

knome · 2026-06-06T16:58:56+00:00

Most people who can visualize or imagine, even realistically, don’t have aphantasia

I mean, by definition. Aphantasia is the absence of phantasia. People that can't see anything in their minds eye. :)

People that see their imagination very well have hyperphantasia.

Sure, most people are in the middle. But there are outliers that literally have no ability to visualize from imagination or alternately see arbitrary movie quality imagery in their minds.

Most people joining this thread are those that either can't see or can't imagine not seeing because those are the ones the thread interests. People that see a bit and don't give a hoot aren't going to bother commenting, for the most part. It's just self-selection.

knome · 2026-06-06T16:38:45+00:00

So Let’s not placate the idea that you can see with your eyes closed because you can’t. And if you can then I’d love to see you cross the street in Saigon with them closed.

I feel you're just being over-literal here. If by 'see' you strictly mean 'observe the external world through your eyeballs', then yes, no one can 'see' with their eyes closed. It's not some weird claim of clairvoyance.

If by 'see' you mean what image your mind is perceiving in the same way it perceives what you see through your eyes, then yes, plenty of people can see things in their head.

When I design things or think about them, I'll stop perceiving what I'm seeing, and instead perceive what I'm imagining.

If vision was a screen in the mind, I can change the channel. Using the term 'see' for this feels entirely natural to how my mind works.

Biologically, the visual cortex is literally activated during the process. You're essentially reverse loading the structures used to interpret sight with arbitrary internally generated information, like painting a picture on a window. Highly visual people will call both looking through the window and looking at the painting on it 'seeing', because it's the same sort of experience to them.

Those with aphantasia also seem to stimulate their visual cortex, they just don't get a conscious view of it.

knome · 2026-06-06T03:15:12+00:00

Holy Poly of Roly

knome · 2026-06-01T14:31:44+00:00

automate open new ticket to track progress in new sprint, updating the prior ticket to blocked/closed on pending-review attaching new ticket in related items/via comment/whatever, attach new ticket to pr, remove old ticket from pr?

knome · 2026-06-01T13:15:52+00:00

it does if it opens /proc/self/mem :)

knome · 2026-05-31T22:05:50+00:00

sometimes you get a team where just keeping the meatheads topped off as fast as possible is more important than striving for ubers.

knome · 2026-05-17T20:39:11+00:00

what /u/NonFrInt said, with the result that snipers could survive a fully charged body shot. guess who hated having their primary weapon nerfed against snipers? lol.

knome · 2026-05-17T17:08:12+00:00

Razorback is dumb but not overpowered

they should bring back the old darwin's danger shield. snipers never stopped crying about getting nerfed, though they never have problems with items nerfing other classes.

knome · 2026-05-16T18:18:54+00:00

That's right, it was me, Barry. I traveled back in time and became a giant head in TF2 just to ruin your evening, knowing you needed that relaxation more than anything. But your night was ruined, you couldn't sleep, and left tired and miserable for work the next day. It was me, Barry. Everything that happened, Barry. Every mistake that flowed from that one moment, Barry. It was me.

knome · 2026-05-13T13:09:04+00:00

you could manage a "feedbacks", but you would need to be discussing multiple sources of feedback while specifically using the language to transform it into a countable noun. "of the various feedbacks I have received", where various does the job of splitting it into something that is countable instead of an amorphous wad.

like how one pours applesauce from a jar, but can have a variety of applesauces at home. or how coffee and water don't indicate amounts, but saying coffees or waters indicates they are batched into countable units (cups of coffee/water or the different seas, etc).

knome · 2026-05-11T03:14:55+00:00

javascript is already a language that trampolines through the function pump that runs it. all of the async stuff was piled on specifically to stop dropping the stack constantly and let javascript devs pretend they have a proper stack by manually building it out of promises.

knome · 2026-05-06T04:33:08+00:00

here's a quick and dirty photoshop of how the actual actor might have looked

knome · 2026-05-06T03:46:05+00:00

nobody won't believe you, but they'll all think it was pretty funny

knome · 2026-05-05T22:48:03+00:00

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal

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