this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
22 points (95.8% liked)
Python
6413 readers
3 users here now
Welcome to the Python community on the programming.dev Lemmy instance!
📅 Events
Past
November 2023
- PyCon Ireland 2023, 11-12th
- PyData Tel Aviv 2023 14th
October 2023
- PyConES Canarias 2023, 6-8th
- DjangoCon US 2023, 16-20th (!django 💬)
July 2023
- PyDelhi Meetup, 2nd
- PyCon Israel, 4-5th
- DFW Pythoneers, 6th
- Django Girls Abraka, 6-7th
- SciPy 2023 10-16th, Austin
- IndyPy, 11th
- Leipzig Python User Group, 11th
- Austin Python, 12th
- EuroPython 2023, 17-23rd
- Austin Python: Evening of Coding, 18th
- PyHEP.dev 2023 - "Python in HEP" Developer's Workshop, 25th
August 2023
- PyLadies Dublin, 15th
- EuroSciPy 2023, 14-18th
September 2023
- PyData Amsterdam, 14-16th
- PyCon UK, 22nd - 25th
🐍 Python project:
- Python
- Documentation
- News & Blog
- Python Planet blog aggregator
💓 Python Community:
- #python IRC for general questions
- #python-dev IRC for CPython developers
- PySlackers Slack channel
- Python Discord server
- Python Weekly newsletters
- Mailing lists
- Forum
✨ Python Ecosystem:
🌌 Fediverse
Communities
- #python on Mastodon
- c/django on programming.dev
- c/pythorhead on lemmy.dbzer0.com
Projects
- Pythörhead: a Python library for interacting with Lemmy
- Plemmy: a Python package for accessing the Lemmy API
- pylemmy pylemmy enables simple access to Lemmy's API with Python
- mastodon.py, a Python wrapper for the Mastodon API
Feeds
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think there's a spectrum here, and I'll clarify the stances.
The spectrum ranges from "Data shouldn't cause the function to do (something wildly) different" to "It should be allowed, even to the point of variable returns"
I think you stand on the former while I stand on the latter. Correct me if I'm wrong though, but that's the vibe I'm getting from the tone in your example.
Suppose we have a function that calculates a price of an object. I feel it is agreeable for us to have
compute_price(with_discount: bool)
, overcompute_price_with_discount() + compute_price_without_discount()
I feel your point your making in the example is a bit exaggerated. Again, coming back to my above example, I don't think we would construe it as
compute_price('with_discount')
.Maybe this is bandwagoning, but one of the reason for my stance is that there are quite a few examples of variable returns.
eg:
getattr
may return a different type base on the key givennumpy
returns different things based on flags. SVD will returnS
ifcompute_uv=False
andS,U,V
otherwiseAbsolutely.
Well, presumably you'd also actually have some other inputs to a price compute function. In which case, I'd suggest bundling all that information into an Invoice type or something that includes whether or not discounts are applied...
getattr
is really special, it's basically a reflection operator, it shouldn't be a model for how a normal function should behave.I'm not familiar with numpy. The linked function though looks like a true case of generic behavior where an input changes an output in a specified way for any number of values that meet its requirements. A boolean flag is never generic.