[Python-Dev] PEP 455: TransformDict (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger raymond.hettinger at gmail.com
Fri Oct 4 23:59:34 CEST 2013

On Oct 4, 2013, at 2:06 PM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not convinced by your usability test.

You're not the one who needs to be convinced ;-)

Please do conduct your own API tests and report back.
This is necessary for a new class like TransformDict that was constructed from scratch and proposed for direct admission to the standard library.

This contrasts with other tools like OrderedDict, ChainMap, and namedtuple which started their lives outside the standard library where we we able observe their fitness for real problems being solved by real users.

None of my consulting client's have anything like a general purpose transforming dict in their utility modules, so we lack the real world experience that informed the design of the other tools in the collections module. To make up for that lack of information, we need to put it in front of users as well as do research into how other languages have tackled the use cases.

In short, we need to know whether the API will make sense to people, whether their code will be more readable with a TransformDict, and whether the zoo of dict variants should continue to grow.

Right now, I don't know those things. All I have to go on is that I personally think the TransformDict is a cool idea. However, that alone isn't sufficient for accepting the PEP.

Raymond

“… in order to get things merged you need to solve not only just your own problem but also realize that the world is bigger than your company and try to solve things in a way where it makes sense for other people, even if primarily it is for your own situation.” -- Linus Torvalds http://www.extremeta.com/2013/09/linus-torvalds-said-linuxcon-kernel-developer-panel/390

-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20131004/35d02263/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list