Are the critiques in "All the things I hate about Python" valid?

Rick Johnson rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com
Mon Feb 26 20:18:38 EST 2018


On Tuesday, February 20, 2018 at 5:45:36 PM UTC-6, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2018 12:42:23 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:
>
> > For instance, if the age is queried many times a second,
> > it would be a much wiser design to set-up an event that
> > will advance the age at the end of the last second of
> > every year
>
> Do you really mean to say that everybody in the world has
> their birthday on January 1st? We're not racehorses you
> know.


No, silly rabbit. I was thinking about the problem from a
_relative_ perspective, whereas you were thinking about the
problem from a _global_ perspective. Neither perspective is
wrong.

If you read my exact words again:

    "a much wiser design to set-up an event that will advance
    the age at the end of the last second of every year"

...you'll notice that i mentioned no specific date.

Therefore, "the last day of the year" (in relativistic
terms) is 11:59:59PM on the calendar day which _precedes_
the day of the month for which you were born.

So, for instance: if your birthday is January 25th 1969, the
last second of the last day of your _first_ year is January
24th 1970 @ 11:59:59PM. And the last second of the last day
of your _second_ year is January 24th 1971 @ 11:59:59PM. And
so forth...

Does this make sense?


>
> Under your scheme, 99.7% of records will return the wrong
> age (off by one) at least once per year. Statistically, 50%
> of queries will be wrong.


Can you whip-up a small code example which proves your
assertion? Hey, and feel free to include the seven dwarfs if
you like. ;-)




More information about the Python-list mailing list