Intuition and Experience

First, read EWD800. It has harsh things to say about relying on intuition in programming. Stack Overflow is full of questions where someone takes their experience with one language and applies it incorrectly and inappropriately to another language.

I get email, periodically, also on this subject. I got one recently on the question of "cast", "coercion" and "conversion" which I found incomprehensible for a long time. I had to reread EWD800 to realize that someone was relying on some sort of vague intuition; it appears that they were desperate to map Java (or C++) concepts on Python.

Casting

In my Python 2.6 book, I use the word "cast" exactly twice. In the same paragraph. Here it is.

I thought that would be enough information to close the subject. I guess not. It appears that some folks have some intuition about type casting that they need to see reflected in other languages, no matter how inappropriate the concept is.

The email asked for a "a nice summary with a simple specific example to hit the point home."

It's quite hard to provide an example of something that doesn't exist. But, I guess, intuition provides a strong incentive to see things which aren't there. I'm not sure how to word it more strongly or clearly. I hate to devolve into blow-by-blow comparison between languages because there are concepts that don't map. I'll work on being more forceful on casting.

Coercion

The words coercion (and coerce) occur more often, since they're sensible Python concepts. After all, Python 2 has formal type coercion rules. See "Coercion Rules". I guess my summary ("Section 3.4.8 of the Python Language Reference covers this in more detail; along with the caveat that the Python 2 rules have gotten too complex.") wasn't detailed or explicit enough.

The relevant quote from the Language manual is this: "As the language has evolved, the coercion rules have become hard to document precisely; documenting what one version of one particular implementation does is undesirable. Instead, here are some informal guidelines regarding coercion. In Python 3.0, coercion will not be supported."

I guess I could provide examples of coercion. However, the fact that it is going to be expunged from the language seems to indicate that it isn't deeply relevant. It appears that some readers have an intuition about coercion that requires some kind of additional details. I guess I have to include the entire quote to dissuade people from relying on their intuition regarding coercion.

Further, the request for "a nice summary with a simple specific example to hit the point home" doesn't fit well with something that -- in the long run -- is going to be removed. Maybe I'm wrong, but omitting examples entirely seemed to hit the point home.

Conversion

Conversion gets it's own section, since it's sensible in a Python context. I kind of thought that a whole section on conversion would cement the concepts. Indeed, there are (IMO) too many examples of conversions in the conversion section. But I guess that showing all of the numeric conversions somehow wasn't enough. I have certainly failed at least one reader. However, I can't imagine what more could be helpful, since it is -- essentially -- an exhaustive enumeration of all conversions for all built-in numeric types.

What I'm guessing is that (a) there's some lurking intuition and (b) Python doesn't match that intuition. Hence the question -- in spite of exhaustively enumerating the conversions. I'm not sure what more can be done to make the concept clear.

It appears that all those examples weren't "nice", "simple" or "specific" enough. Okay. I'll work on that.

From http://slott-softwarearchitect.blogspot.com/2010/12/intuition-and-experience.html