Re: [Duplicity-talk] "full-if-older-than" not working?

[Scott Hannahs]

Expanding the code to make it more readable is not always a bad thing.  I still remember the rule from PASCAL of not making a function longer than 1 screen height.  I have spent a LOT of time with C and some with C++, there are a lot of advocates for many languages.  Probably more languages I learned that are no longer used than in use.  (Algol 68 anyone?) At the moment I am looking more and more to Rust and/or Swift.  Given the number of cores on modern machines I really want to exploit concurrency.  Python as an interpretive (or even byte compiled) language can’t really take advantage of that.  I have done a lot of instrumentation in LabVIEW but that is very nice for parallel processing but somewhat of a niche language.

As for committees, the saying I remember is “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”, but the Heinlein quote is memorable as well.

I have enough issues patching Duplicity for the setup.py and actually using setup-tng.py for building and installing.  The fink package manager is fairly flexible but tends to redo things that are better done in pip.  Once you pick a package manager going around it always leads to conflicts.  I will see what happens with PyPA.

-Scott

On Oct 14, 2023, at 4:44 PM, Kenneth Loafman <kenneth@loafman.com> wrote:

Yeah, black does tend to expand some.  On test_cli_main.py the only thing 'changed' was the very last blob to add a test.  The rest of that module is black reformatting.

After working with Python since 2004 (v1.5.2) , I'll say it's good for development of small projects, but gets more and more unwieldy the larger the project.  The changes between 1 and 2 were fairly innocuous, but between 2 and 3 backwards compatibility took a real big hit.  I don't plan to be doing Python for 3 to 4.

Right now PyPA (Python Packaging Authority) is on my radar.  According to them, instead of setup.py we should be using pyproject.toml files, and make everything table driven.  That's going to be a major effort for duplicity.  They are deprecating and removing things we use in setup.py to force the conversion.  Someday I'll get to develop new code, not just munge old code into shape.

I miss the clarity of C/C++ (on UNIX, not Windows).  The language is solid and the committee running it is competent.  I'm beginning to think Python is run by a committee of committees.  Heinlein said: "A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.".  After all these years, I have to agree with him.

...Ken