There is no guarantee that the comment is kept up to date with the code. “Self documenting code” is a meme, but clearly written code is pretty much always preferable to unclear code with a comment, largely because you can actually be sure that the code does what it says it does.

Note: You still need to comment your code kids.

Exactly as you said yourself: Checking falsieness does not guarantee that the object has a length. There is considerable overlap between the two, and if it turns out that this check is a performance bottleneck (which I have a hard time imagining) it can be appropriate to check for falsieness instead of zero length. But in that case, don’t be surprised if you suddenly get an obscure bug because of some custom object not behaving the way you assumed it would.

I guess my primary point is that we should be checking for what we actually care about, because that makes intent clear and reduces the chance for obscure bugs.

I write a lot of Python. I hate it when people use “X is more pythonic” as some kind of argument for what is a better solution to a problem. I also have a hang up with people acting like python has any form of type safety, instead of just embracing duck typing.This lands us at the following:

The article states that “you can check a list for emptiness in two ways: if not mylist or if len(mylist) == 0”. Already here, a fundamental mistake has been made: You don’t know (and shouldn’t care) whether mylist is a list. These two checks are not different ways of doing the same thing, but two different checks altogether. The first checks whether the object is “falsey” and the second checks whether the object has a well defined length that is zero. These are two completely different checks, which often (but far from always) overlap. Embrace the duck type- type safe python is a myth.

Of all youtube jackasses, this might be one of the biggest. Imagine making a living off pushing semi-scams on twelve year olds and being a nuisance at sporting events…

This is just another step down “I honestly just can’t comprehend the stupidity of what is going on in the American government”-alley…

Like… what do they even expect to come of this? Why are they even interested in doing it? Is it just to stir up shit?