So, stable packages?

Weird. You almost never need to do string eval in python, and whenever there is something where you think you need eval there is a better and safer way to achieve the same result.

Also, I was bending my brain but I couldn’t really figure out what this eval was for until I wrote out some scratch code myself to figure it out.

Turns out this 5 lines or so was constructing a string to do dict lookup and then evalling that. So say you have a dict d = {‘foo’: ‘bar’} and you have a variable i=foo and want to look up d[i], instead of just doing that it was doing something like

   eval(‘d[‘+i+’]’)

So I rejected the change and they came back with “but we’ve always done it that way”. I grep the codebase and yes. There were about 200+ uses of eval, all of which were constructing a string to look something up in a dictionary and then evaling the result. Some person who clearly didn’t program in python had found this twisted way to look things up in a dictionary and then this team had dutifully copied and pasted it throughout the codebase.

[1] ie I wasn’t there from the start of the project

Example

    somethingService = ... 
    somethingService = somethingService.Do()

Me reading this article: yup, yup, yup, yup, wait a minute!

This part feels a bit snuck in, in a "leading and pacing" kind of way: All the other points are long-established no brainers, but this one is still controversially discussed and I'd say - in the general form it's presented here - wrong.

The author is still right that it's wrong to categorically dismiss AI tools when coding. But you'd have to apply a lot more caution to this point than to the others.

I hope sneaking this in wasn't the real motivation of the article.