Comment by zephen
3 days ago
I have never found either (1) or (2) to be a problem in hundreds of thousands of lines of Python.
> In particular, C3's "path shortening" ... we'd have to pay by actually writing `std.io.file.open("foo.txt")` or change to a flat module system.
You can easily and explicitly shorten paths in other languages. For example, in Python "from mypackage.mysubpackage import mymodule; mymodule.myfunc()"
Python even gracefully handles name collisions by allowing you to change the name of the local alias, e.g. "from my_other_package.mysubpackage import mymodule as other_module"
I find the "from .. import" to be really handy to understand touchpoints for other modules, and it is not very verbose, because you can have a comma-separated list of things that you are aliasing into the current namespace.
(You can also use "from some_module import *" to bring everything in, which is highly useful for exploratory programming but is an anti-pattern for production software.)
Of course you can explicitly shorten paths. I was talking about C3's path shortening which is doing this for you. This means you do not need to alias imports, which is otherwise how languages do it.
I don't want to get too far into details, but it's understandable that people misunderstand it if they haven't used it, as it's a novel approach not used by any other language.
Oh, I understand it. I just think that (a) explicit is better than implicit; and (b) the amount of characters that Python requires to keep imports explicit is truly minimal, and is a huge aid to figuring out where things came from.