"no variable or argument declarations are necessary."

[Bengt Richter]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 21:56:12 -0700, aleax at mail.comcast.net (Alex Martelli) wrote:

>Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> wrote:
>   ...
>> >>   egold = 0:
>> >>   while egold < 10:
>> >>     if test():
>> >>       ego1d = egold + 1
>> >> 
>> >
>> > Oh come on. That is a completely contrived example,
>> 
>> No it is not. You may not have had any use for this
>> kind of code, but unfamiliary with certain types
>> of problems, doesn't make something contrived.
>
>It's so contrived it will raise a SyntaxError due to the spurious extra
>colon on the first line;-).
>
Glad to see a smiley ;-)

>Or, consider, once the stray extra colon is fixed:
>
[... demonstration of effective tool use to diagnose contrived[1] snippet's problems ...]

[1] the code snippet certainly seems contrived to me too. Not sure whether entire class of code
that it may have been intended to represent is contrived, but I'm willing to give the benefit
of the doubt if I sense no ill will ;-)
[...]
>
>> > It would give the 
>> > programmer a false sense of security since they 'know' all their 
>> > misspellings are caught by the compiler. It would not be a substitute for
>> > run-time testing.
>> 
>> I don't think anyone with a little bit of experience will be so naive.
This strikes me as a somewhat provocative and unfortunately ambiguous statement ;-)

The way I read it was to assume that Antoon was agreeing with the judgement that
the 'sense of security' would be false, and that he was saying that an experienced
programmer would not be so naive as to feel secure about the correctness of his
code merely on the basis of a compiler's static checks (and thus skip run-time testing).

>
>Heh, right.  After all, _I_, for example, cannot have even "a little bit
>of experience" -- after all, I've been programming for just 30 years
>(starting with my freshman year in university), and anyway all I have to
>show for that is a couple of best-selling books, and a stellar career
>culminating (so far) with my present job as Uber Technical Lead for
>Google, Inc, right here in Silicon Valley... no doubt Google's reaching
>over the Atlantic to come hire me from Italy, and the US government's
>decision to grant me a visa under the O-1 category (for "Aliens with
>Outstanding Skills"), were mere oversights on their part that,
>obviously, I cannot have even "a little bit of experience", given that I
>(like great authors such as Bruce Eckel and Robert Martin) entirely
>agree with the opinion you deem "so naive"... that any automatic
>catching of misspellings can never be a substitute for unit-testing!
I somehow don't think Antoon was really disagreeing with that (maybe because after
45+ years of programming and debugging I think it would be too absurd ;-)
>
>
>Ah well -- my good old iBook's settings had killfiles for newsreaders,
>with not many entries, but yours, Antoon, quite prominent and permanent;
>unfortunately, that beautiful little iBook was stolen
>(http://www.papd.org/press_releases/8_17_05_fix_macs_211.html), so I got
Ugh, bad luck ... but if it had to happen, better that it wasn't from your home.

>myself a brand new one (I would deem it incorrect to use for personal
>purposes the nice 15" Powerbook that Google assigned me), and it takes
>some time to reconstruct all the settings.  But, I gotta get started
>sometime -- so, welcome, o troll, as the very first entry in my
>brand-new killfile.
I'd urge you to reconsider, and see if you really see trollish _intent_
in Antoon ;-)

>
>In other words: *PLONK*, troll!-)
IMO that's a bit harsh, especially coming from a molto certified heavyweight ;-)

Antoon doesn't strike me as having the desire to provoke for the sake of provoking,
which seems to me to be the sine qua non hallmark of trolls. Of course anyone
with any ego is likely to be feel like posting defensive tit-for-tat to "correct"
any inadequate appreciation of worth coming from the other side, and that can degenerate
into something that looks like pure troll postings, but I think that is normal succumbing
to ego temptations, not signs true trollishness. E.g., ISTM Antoon and Diez were managing
rather well, both being frustrated in getting points across, but both displaying patience
and a certain civility. To me, the "winning" posts are the ones that further the development
of the "truth" about the topic at hand, and avoid straying into ad hominem irrelevancies.
OTOH, I think everyone is entitled at least to ask if a perceived innuendo was real and
intentional (and should be encouraged to do so before launching a counter-offence).
Sometimes endless niggling and nitpicking gets tiresome, but I don't think that is necessarily
troll scat either. And one can always tune out ;-)

Anyway, thanks for the pychecker and pylint demos. And I'm glad that we can enjoy your posts again,
even if for a limited time.

-- Martellibot admirer offering his .02USD for peace ... ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter