[Python-ideas] Inconsistencies (was: Shuffled)

[Rustom Mody]

On Saturday, September 10, 2016 at 6:30:47 PM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Redirecting to python-list as I don't believe this belongs on -ideas.
> 
> On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 10:09 PM, Sven R. Kunze wrote:
> >> On 08.09.2016 04:00, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 11:43:59PM +0200, Sven R. Kunze wrote:
> >>
> >>> BUT experienced devs also need to recognize and respect the fact that
> >>> younger/unexperienced developers are just better in detecting
> >>> inconsistencies and bloody work-arounds.
> >>
> >> That is not a fact. It is the opposite of a fact
> >>
> >
> > You might have heard of: "There are no such things as facts, just opinions.
> > Everything, we see is a perspective not the truth." See below, why this
> > applies here as well.
> 
> Yes, I've heard that. It is false.
> 
> Some things are absolute hard facts. There is no way in which 1 will
> ever be greater than 2, ergo "1 is less than 2" is strictly true, and
> not a matter of opinion. If you hear someone trying to claim
> otherwise, would you let him have his opinion, or would you treat it
> as incorrect?

You are confusing analytic and synthetic truths, an old philosophic distinction
 with a new special place in CS
http://blog.languager.org/2015/07/cs-history-2.html


Analytic truths have a tautologous feel that makes them sound strangely irrelevant (as an observation) eg.
“What is is”
“Something is the case or is not the case”
More informally:
“Time is irreversible”
“We all die”
etc

All true but nothing is communicated by saying it
Mathematical truths like 1 < 2
are in the same category as “triangles are 3-sided figures”
same as “triangles are triangular”
True... and tautologus

When people commonly talk of ‘facts’ they are typically synthetic
Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s²
Planets move in elliptic orbits round the sun

All these *scientific* truths as Karl Popper pointed out are scientific exactly
BECAUSE they are falsifiable.
Unlike say: “God created the world”

And to say that they are falsifiable is exactly what Sven is saying:
They are the dominant opinion of the scientific establishment
And will change when the fashions change

As for shuffle vs shuffled I am very much in the shuffled camp.
It irks me that 
- sort and sorted are named backwards — should have been dosort and sort
- tuples are less 1st class than lists (why no tuple comprehensions?)
- what you get from writing a comprehension inside a {} is a set not a frozenset
- set and frozenset are named backwards; should have been mutableset and set
- there are no frozendicts (though dict comprehensions are niftier in python
 than in most functional languages
- etc etc

Which I guess you can summarize as (me saying that) functional programming is 
natural and  imperative programming is a stone-age relic.

[And BTW in the other thread in which the closeness or not of asyncio, threads,
processes is being debated it is so clear to those who have seen radically 
different paradigms like Erlang that the problem is not the specifics of 
async/threads/processes but the general situation that python is stuck in imperative-land
]