this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Still hurts, but sometimes it's the only option.
If you're trying to confirm things like account existence/deletion, there's often no "account exists" function to return true or false. You just have to figure out the specific exception thrown and catch that specific one.
The worst are libraries that don't give specific exceptions, so you have to catch all exceptions then do extra work to tell what the specific situation is. Does the account not exist, or is the system unreachable?
Yeah, I had a similar case with some authentication middleware I used that was part of a library.
It would always throw an exception when a user wasn't authenticated instead of just giving me some flag I could check.
Wouldn't have done it that way, but it was okay for an API controller.
That’s horrifying. That’s a solid reason to avoid Python like the plague.
While i also disagree with python's tendency to use exceptions as control flow
Python is a pretty stellar scripting language. I wouldn't use it for app dev, but it's quite handy for the odd automation or CLI task
I've done a little bit of Python in the past, the biggest thing being an automation task that borderline became an app. I certainly can imagine using it for scripts, though I default to bash because that's almost always available but TBH mostly because inertia. Beyond that my default is Go because inertia (and I love Go). I watched a video by the Primeagen (on YT) - in his view, Rust is better for text/data pipelines and CLI tools. Being very familiar with Go and not at all familiar with Rust, that's an interesting take because honestly writing a CLI in Go is kind of meh.