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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2024 09:55:40 +0200
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On 19/06/2024 22:42, Malcolm McLean wrote:
> On 19/06/2024 18:49, David Brown wrote:
>> On 19/06/2024 18:52, Malcolm McLean wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, but that's not quite what we want. A typical input would go.
>>
>> It's extremely hard to guess what you want (not "we", but "you" - no 
>> one else wants this kind of thing) when you have bizarre requirements 
>> and only give bits of them.  So modifying the Python code is left as 
>> an exercise if you are interested, especially as it is off-topic.
>>
> This was a work project, so "we". I would never set up such a system. 
> But we hasd light-themed and dark-themed icons and they hsd to be 
> arranged just so so that the program would find them and show the right 
> theme. And as you can imagine, it was a nuisance to we programmers to 
> set up the resource scripts so that eveything was right.
> 
> So why not get Python to do the job? But there wasn't much enthusiasm. 
> So, despite not knowing Python, I decided to have a go, and I got a 
> sorted list of icons quite easily, and it looked promising. But now the 
> special requirement for a little deviation from alphabetical sort. And I 
> couldn't work out how to do that.
> 
> And it wasn't what I was supposed to be doing or paid to do. We used to 
> have a weekly meeting where we discussed work done. If I said "oh, and I 
> spent an afternoon knocking up this little Python script to help get 
> those resource files together", then that's OK. If I say that was my 
> main focus for the week, no, and if I say I spent substantial time on it 
> and it didn't even work - well that really wouldn't go down well.
> So I had to abandon it once it became clear that it would take many 
> hours of trawling through docs and online tips to try to work out a way. 
> And no-one has posted a solution here. And, whilst there will be a way, 
> I suspect that it just doesn't use the mainstream langage facilities. I 
> suspect that Python isn't really a programming language - a language 
> designed to make it easy to apply arbitrary transforms to data - it's a 
> scripting language - a language designed to make it easy to call 
> pre-existings code to do the things it is designed to do.
> 
> But maybe I'm unfair.
> 

It's not so much that you are being unfair, it is that you are arguing 
from a position of almost total ignorance.  It's fine to say you know 
little about Python and can't comment much on it.  It is /not/ fine to 
say (and demonstrate) that you know almost nothing about a language and 
then make wild claims about what it can and cannot do.

This is not a Python group, so I have not bothered writing code for your 
weird requirements.  Suffice it to say that it would not be hard, and it 
would use "mainstream language facilities" (I take that to mean the 
language and its standard libraries, rather than third-party tools).

Yes, Python is a "programming language" by any reasonable definition of 
that term.  (It is /also/ useful as a scripting language - languages can 
be suitable for more than one task.)  Yes, it is designed to make it 
easy to "apply arbitrary transforms to data" - it is usually very much 
easier to do this than in C, at the cost of less efficient run-time 
performance.  And no language has pre-existing code or standard 
functions to handle your highly unusual sorting requirements - such 
things always need their own code.


You've made it clear you know nothing about the language.  Fair enough - 
we all know almost nothing about almost all programming languages.  But 
trust someone who does.