I like programming and anime.

I manage the bot /u/mahoro@lemmy.ml

  • 3 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Just because you can get part of your education remotely or through self-learning didn't mean "anything can be learned online".

    And if you were hiring a math tutor for your kid, would you prefer a self-proclaimed expert from watching YouTube videos or would you want someone who got a degree from a credentialed university? And even if you don't care, why are you surprised that others would be skeptical of the YouTube expert?

    Remote learning can be fine for some things, and self learning through informal channels are also fine, but it's not a full on replacement for formal education in all cases.




  • The first way to use it is with any type annotation: you just use it for documentation.

    # int annotation
    def add_1_to_number(x: int) -> int:
        return x + 1
    
    # callable annotation
    def printer(x: int, func: Callable[[int], int]) -> None:
        results = func(x)
        print(f"Your results: {results}")
    

    These type annotations can help document and make editors parse your code to make suggestions/auto-complete work better.

    The second way to use it is by creating a callable. A callable is an abstract base class that requires you to implement the __call__ method. Your new callable can be called like any function.

    class Greeter(Callable):
    
        def __init__(self, greeting: str):
            self.greeting = greeting
    
        def __call__(self, name: str):
            print(f"{self.greeting}, {name}")
    
    
    say_hello = Greeter("Hello") # say_hello looks like a function
    say_hello("jim")  # Hello, jim
    





  • Most of us have bad memories of over-complex hierarchies we regret seeing, but this is probably due to the dominance of OOP in recent decades.

    This sentence here is why inheritance gets a bad reputation, rightly or wrongly. Inheritance sounds intuitive when you're inheriting Vehicle in your Bicycle class, but it falls apart when dealing with more abstract ideas. Thus, it's not immediately clear when and why you should use inheritance, and it soon becomes a tangled mess.

    Thus, OO programs can easily fall into a trap of organizing code into false hierarchies. And those hierarchies may not make sense from developer to developer who is reading the code.

    I'm not a fan of OO programming, but I do think it can occasionally be a useful tool.



  • Ehhh, I don't quite agree with this. I've done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic: true, false, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

    Two examples:

    1. A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There's a field where they need to agree to something, but it's optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can't change the column from is_agreed to agreed_at.

    2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.