this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
42 points (97.7% liked)
Learn Programming
1625 readers
1 users here now
Posting Etiquette
-
Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.
-
Provide everything up front. Don't make people fish for more details in the comments. Provide background information and examples.
-
Be present for follow up questions. Don't ask for help and run away. Stick around to answer questions and provide more details.
-
Ask about the problem you're trying to solve. Don't focus too much on debugging your exact solution, as you may be going down the wrong path. Include as much information as you can about what you ultimately are trying to achieve. See more on this here: https://xyproblem.info/
Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For following good practices, I highly recommend using a linter like ruff. I've learned a lot from it's explanations on why my code is bad.
Also I have tried to avoid using else statements.
how do you avoid using else, and why?
Disclaimer: I would only call my skill level as intermediate and would yield to any more senior developer here.
It's not a hard and fast rule, but you can usually write it without the else and in fewer lines.
So take for a very contrived example a function that needs to return a non boolean value for a boolean test. A use case could be if you need to figure out a string argument for another function, such as you need to determine if you need to keep the "first" or "last" duplicate in a dataframe (I'm thinking about pandas's df.drop_dupliactes method).
Continuing with the drop_duplicate thing let's say we have a dataframe we need to de-duplicate but for some reason if the overall length of the dataframe is even, we need to keep the first duplicate and if the dataframe length is odd we keep the last. I don't know why we would, but that was a very particular request from the customer and we need the money to buy more Warhammer figurines.
Here's an essay that goes into more detail
This is easier to think about for me: am I weird? Numbers can be interpreted as boolean in C but not in Go, which came later and is presumably an improvement.