Jens Theisen wrote: > Jay wrote: >> How much time in your C/C++ code is spent casting and trying to >>trick the compiler into doing something that it thinks you shouldn't be >>doing? > > Not much frankly. Though I have no doubt that there is a lot of code that > does, but more so in older C++ code.
I think the real difference between Python and C++ code in this respect is rather how easy it is to adapt the code to a change in requirements. How many lines of code of C++ or Python needs to be changed when you get a particular change request. There are some cases where the Python programmer will simply smile and say, "that already works" (well, he should probably write a test case and run that first), where the C++ programmer gets to do a lot of changes to his code. Usually, the difference is probably smaller than that, but the Python coder is probably less nervous about change requests (provided that he has proper automated tests)... There is probably more logical duplication in the C++ code, with different code snippets handling different cases where one set of Python code works with several differnt types. Changes in the semantics of these functions lead to changes in one place for the Python coder, and several changes for the C++ coder, which means a risk that a fix is partially implemented, and works in some cases but fails in others. >>Because in all of my own industry experience, it's been MUCH easier to >>jump into someone else's Python code than someone else's C++ code (and >>at my last job, I had to do a lot of both). I find Python to be much >>more self-documenting, because there's not so much scaffolding all over >>the place obfuscating the true intention of the code. I'm sure this depends a lot on what people are used to. I had to provide source code for inspection for a job interview, and the reviewers (who write both C++ and Python) said that they felt that my code was more difficult to understand than the other code samples (which were in C++ or Java). (I still got a job though.) This might be because I'm a crappy programmer, or because the other people typically handed in some university project they had been fully in charge of and written for the purpose of examination, while my code had been changed over a few years based on the whim of a fairly non-technical customer, and only ever read by me. It might be because my code dealt with a more complex problem, or at least something that was difficult for the reviewers to grasp. It could also be because the reviewers were more used to C++. They said that they felt that the lack of .h-files made it difficult for them to get an overview of the code, but it didn't seem that they used anything like pydoc to get a picture of the API. In other words, your milage might vary, and the choice of programming language is just one among many factors that influence how easy it is to read code. Having said that, I agree: It's typically easier to get into someone else's Python code. Particularly when so-called C++ code is really C with lots of globals, no classes and 63 pages of functions (many of which are several pages long, the longest being 13 pages) which often modify the global variables. (Yes, I have such a nice thing on my table now. Happily, I don't have to maintain it. I'm writing a Python program that partially does the same thing, but I doubt this program will help me understand the problems involved, or help me find optimal solutions...) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
