As a current Rustup maintainer with a bit of Ada background I gotta say: nice work!
I do feel Ada as a language is way ahead of its time, but when I was learning it (a while before the first Alire release) I was also puzzled by dev environment setup. I guess the Rust experience has shown the importance of a friendly onboarding experience, so I’m very glad to see Ada is going this direction as well with Alire and now Getada :)
Many thanks for this book! Think Python 2nd is the first book I've ever read in order to teach myself programming.
Now I've come a long way to become an actual developer shipping real products and have certainly learned a whole lot more on the topic, but I still think the first steps are the most important/difficult ones. Although I've moved away from Python towards other platforms such as Rust, the basic concepts covered in this book are still very much relevant.
I'm really excited to learn that Think Python has become more modern and interactive with this update!
I really love the fact that most of the time people from the Golang community would like to say "look what I've made with Golang!" That's the sign of success: the users (here I mean general devs) should not care too much about the language per se, they still have applications to ship!
Rustaceans tend to talk more about cool new language features. They are critical to what Rust does, but maybe they have also got too much attention.
I have also encountered this quite often. I'll say the ideal solution would be "postfix streaming methods" like `.filter` and `.map`. Unfortunately, Python doesn't have those (prefix `filter`s and `map`s are not even close), and you have comprehension expressions at best. To make things worse, complex comprehensions can also create confusion, so for your particular example I'll probably say it's acceptable. It could be better if you use unpacking instead of indexing though, as others have pointed out.
The last time I gave F# a shot, I tried to write a simple Telegram bot in it.
Just to test how much I would actually benefit from the .NET ecosystem, I chose to use a C# wrapper for the Telegram API. Suddenly I had to handle null references and exceptions everywhere (it's in this regard even worse than Rust, where I'm guaranteed to get Options and Results).
I know proper support for C# T? type interop is in the works (https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/pull/15181), but really it seemed to me that too few cared about F# to get it landed in a reasonable timeframe.
I'd really love to see a pragmatic FP language with a reasonable amount of libs to choose from (both natively and via interop without much effort), but F# was a bit far from that description IMO.
Exactly. I recently started to write some LEAN which uses a ton of Unicode characters and I still use JetBrains Mono with ligatures on. ≠ is 1 unit wide but != is 2 units wide, so it's not that confusing as one might think.
Besides, if someone insists, it's also possible to make a language-specific setting in the editor to disable ligatures in those languages :)
Agreed. It seems to me that doctests (i.e. code examples in docs that also count as tests, common in Python and Rust codebases) can possibly cover parts of this.
However the borrow checker is not only about new/delete, it also prevents other forms of reference invalidations (e.g. when holding a reference to a vector element while appending to the vector, that reference can become invalid when the vector gets resized).
I do feel Ada as a language is way ahead of its time, but when I was learning it (a while before the first Alire release) I was also puzzled by dev environment setup. I guess the Rust experience has shown the importance of a friendly onboarding experience, so I’m very glad to see Ada is going this direction as well with Alire and now Getada :)