Top 5 DEV Comments from the Past Week

#bestofdev

This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.

@jmfayard shares a great conspiracy theory in How programming languages got their names:

Jean-Michel (jmfayard.dev) • Jan 4 '20 • Edited

My favorite conspiration theory is that the names go and swift were chosen specifically to make it hard to google stuff.

If I invent a programming language, I will call it the.

@ryansmith talks about "the age of skimming" in response to The New Years Resolution That Changed My Career:

Ryan Smith • Jan 2 '20

That is a good one, I think we are in the "age of skimming" where people obtain information through titles and descriptions rather than reading the content in its entirety. I think the sheer amount of information available online can be overwhelming. Instead of going in-depth on one thing, we skim a variety of things to make sure we get it all. There is also the reason of "I don't have time" that we all tell ourselves, but articles usually take around five minutes to read (or have an "X minute read" indicator). I know I have that time to spare and I'm sure others do as well, we just need to focus our efforts a little more.

@bsaad adds to the Probably the hottest code refactoring you ever saw 🔥 post with a really helpful suggestion:

bsaad • Jan 4 '20

Great post, I like how you took the time to explain step by step.

I'd suggest also the following change to make the "business rules" clearer by extracting them from the formatting logic:

const formatMap = {
  uk: ["zip", "suburb", "city", "state"],
  us: ["city", "state", "zip"],
  nz: ["zip", "city", "county", "state"],
  default: ["zip", "suburb", "state", "county"],
}

const formatAddress = (address) => { 
  const format = formatMap[address.countryCode] || formatMap.default;
  return format.map(field => address[field]).filter(Boolean).join(', ');
};

@lazerfx adds their thoughts to Changing your name is a hard unsolved problem in Computer Science, adding more reasons about why this is such a problem:

Peter Street • Jan 3 '20

This has multiple significant impacts - for one, there's those who go through a name change because of life changes like those mentioned in the article, but also people change names because of purely personal reasons (for instance, deed poll), marriage, adoption, or others that I haven't thought of. This impacts more than 50% of the population at some point in time! Not to mention couples where both change their names (double-barrelled surnames) or where family names adapt as you grow and 'gain' names as some cultures do it. So - no matter why, this should be something we are better at, I completely agree... and it's a huge problem (My wife is still changing her name and going through hassle, nearly 6 years on from us both getting married).

@jheld offered a great overview in What is the state of Python versions?:

Jason Held • Jan 3 '20

Py3.6 is likely your base target, feature wise. 3.7 has some improvements and more features but 3.6 still has more explicit support. However they are mostly compatible. 3.8 is the newest. 3.9 is in alpha.

If you're looking for asyncio support you would really need 3.5+, but ideally 3.6+.

Good type hint/annotation support is really 3.6+, though 3.5 has some support.

3.6+ has f-strings (f"hi {name}").

3.7 has official built in dataclass support (3.6 has a PyPI package), which is for helping reduce class boilerplate but also helping with memory management.

See you next week for more great comments ✌