Peace
-stephan

Intellij came much earlier than 15 years or even 10 years after Java was invented. Just do some research before stating facts. Tip: Google it (if you can’t do that as it seem to be the case, it’s 5 years)

Peace
-stephan


public class TestIde {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Object obj = getSomeObject();

public static Object getSomeObject() {
return (double) 10;
}
}


since when the code gets to the system out point the obj is definitely Double or something that extends Double, the cast is going to throw an exception because String is neither of them. IntelliJ IDEA here highlights the cast and tells you the cast is not going to work. You may argue this is a stupid code and one should not write a stupid code. However, this is just an example. In my own experience, I have always had to maintain someone else’s code and I have always had to change something in the middle of a method and it is easy to ignore Ifs like what is in the example above, specially if the two parts of the code don’t fit in screen so that you see them both at the same time.

Well, that’s my two cents

If you use an IDE that has strong refactoring capabilities, you can use the code itself as your scratch-pad, so you learn to work in a way in which you experiment with live code rather than imagined or pencilled code that must later be typed in.

Nah, most developers write sucky code if they are man enough to admit it. In my case, I need an artificial productivity enhancer to bridge some of the gap between myself and developers like Steve. And I’m *not* being facetious here!

As far as the Python docstrings, I still stand by my statement that self-documenting code is far superior.

I write sucky code

Maybe you should stop being a programmer, then.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that your buddy’s story isn’t funny at all, but is instead quite sad. Clearly, their putting type names into Python function names was intended to help only the human programmer, not the Python runtime or libraries. So why not use the Python features intended specifically for assisting the programmer? If they were really having trouble tracking function expectations, it might have been because they were erroneously trying to use and enforce static language approaches rather than taking full advantage of the language’s dynamism. Obviously, I don’t know for sure because I don’t know any of that project’s details, but I’ve certainly seen this issue cause problems for other dynamic language development efforts. At the very least, a more useful approach for them, as I mentioned in my blog, would have been to fill out each function’s docstring and make it as descriptive as possible. The docstrings are readily available to the developer from the Python interactive prompt, and they would have been way more useful to your friend’s team than their Hungarian notation variant.