[Python-Dev] Polymorphic best practices (original) (raw)

John Nagle nagle at animats.com
Sat Sep 18 20🔞19 CEST 2010

On 9/18/2010 2:29 AM, python-dev-request at python.org wrote:

Polymorphic best practices [was: (Not) delaying the 3.2 release]

If you're hung up on this, try writing the user-level documentation

first. Your target audience is a working-level Web programmer, not someone who knows six programming languages and has a CS degree. If the explanation is too complex, so is the design.

Coding in this area is quite hard to do right.  There are

issues with character set, HTML encoding, URL encoding, and internationalized domain names. It's often done wrong; I recently found a Google service which botched it. Python libraries should strive to deliver textual data to the programmer in clean Unicode. If someone needs the underlying wire representation it should be available, but not the default.

            John Nagle

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