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Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsActually, Use pytz Instead
So here is something I don't understand about Python.
In this video, we see a few useful variables set such as: pacific = pytz.timezone('US/Pacific') utc = pytc.utc
These seem to make so much sense, that I wonder why they aren't simply defined, or set, by default in the pytx library.
3 Answers
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherBecause they won't always be needed by everyone and Python is explicit. You shouldn't do anything your users haven't asked you to do (you being a library author and your users being developers using your library).
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsSo everything in a library does something? Nothing is ever set or predefined? As I go through learning Python, it seems like some things have been predefined. Maybe to avoid confusion, the developers decided to keep the number of predefined things to a minimum?
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsIt does seems like Python has predefined some things because re.M and re.MULITLINE do the same thing (re.M = re.MULTILINE, correct?), so it is hard to understand (from a beginners point of view) why they don't set other things like utc = pytz.utc. But again, I could see doing so as potentially causing confusion if a user did not know which variables were pre-set, and then tried to create a variable of their own that they chose to call utc.
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherOf course there will be some presets. Not all developers agree on what should and shouldn't be explicit/implicit. But something like having a predefined attribute for every timezone always attached to the library is a bit overkill.
As for pytz.utc, it is already set. It just happens to be namespaced (inside the pytz library). You wouldn't want them to automatically set a variable in your namespace. What if you already had a variable named utc and they overwrote it?
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsYes, thanks, that's essentially what I pointed out in my last sentence. It almost feels like it would be useful to be able to pull in a file with all of the time zones variables preset. Maybe people do that.
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherYeah, sorry, saw that right as I was submitting the comment.
It could be handy, yes, but that would probably be a pretty special case (when you'd need all of them at once).