On Sat, Oct 02, 2021 at 08:33:59PM -0600, Finn Mason wrote:
> I've found that the `if __name__ == "__main__"` idiom is unintuitive and
> feels unnecessary,
The Python community thinks nothing of writing code with metaclasses,
functions and classes as first-class citizens, recursion, parallisation
using threads and process, concurrency with asynchronous coroutines,
implementing astonishingly clever algorithms that rely on deep
mathematical properties that literally require a decade or more of study
to understand, and all that is fine, but checking whether a global
variable is set to a particular value is too unintuitive?
Of course nobody is going to *intuit* that the global variable is called
`__name__` or that the value is `"__main__"`. But neither is anybody
going to intuit that the way we load a single function from a module is
from module import function
as opposed to, let's say, "laden functie van onderdeel". Or that stdout
is in the sys module. Or that floating point maths violates
associativity:
(0.17 + 0.69) + 0.97 != 0.17 + (0.69 + 0.97)
These are all things we have to learn, not intuit.
The first time I saw Python code, after being told that it was "really
intuitive", I couldn't make head or tails of what on earth it was about,
especially all those curly braces and square brackets and colons. And
what's self, or a class? To me, a class was what you were in when you
went to school, or maybe a socio-economic group.
If Python was so intuitive, maybe it was just me, I was an idiot for not
being able to guess the meaning from first principles.
So I think that we sometimes take "unintuitive" too seriously.
> I never liked how you can't import your package in its own __main__.py file
> (or maybe I'm missing something, packaging isn't my strong suit)
I would expect that either a relative import:
from . import function
or an absolute import:
from mypackage import function
import mypackage
should work.
--
Steve
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