[Python-Dev] How far to go with user-friendliness

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 11:09:50PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> Dima's right that the main defence against this kind of error is
> actually linters and IDEs, but detecting this particular one at
> runtime is harmless, so there's no particular reason *not* to do it
> when it's possible to construct a reasonable rationale for "Why this
> particular typo?" and not all the other possible ways of transposing
> adjacent letters in "assert".

I've read this thread and the bug report and I'm not sure about this 
reasonable rationale. It seems like an utterly arbitrary choice to 
single out a single typo for special treatment while ignoring other 
equivalent typos, equally easy to make and equally difficult to spot. 
You even mentioned people with dyslexia yourself. As I understand it, 
dyslexics would find assert and assery equally hard to distinguish as 
assret versus assert, and t and y are next to each other on the same row 
of QWERTY keyboards.

BTW, am I missing something? The issue tracker says that the patch was 
accepted and a new "unsafe" keyword argument was added over a year ago, 
but that doesn't seem to be documented anywhere here:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.mock.html


-- 
Steve