Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffparsons | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm confident that I remember `time.sleep` wants a number of seconds, then I could miss an obvious error there.

For example...

    time.sleep(timedelta(minutes=5).total_milliseconds)

...looks just as plausible. So what does this solve?

View on HN

It communicates my intent to the reviewer and future readers of the code that: 1) I mean to set the duration to 5 minutes, which is easier parsed by humans than 300 seconds. 2) I'm passing seconds into time.sleep, which makes any mistakes I make more obvious.

I'm not saying time.sleep can't be improved but my method makes it easier to find any mistakes I've made in the future.

As a demonstration, reading your code makes it more obvious that you've passed the wrong unit into time.sleep.

Got it — so it's more about mitigating the badness when it's somebody else's API.

Seems reasonable! :)

When I encounter these sorts of methods (which is surprisingly rare these days) I tend to double-check what units the method takes and additionally add a comment above my call saying "`sleep` takes duration in seconds", just to give future readers more ways to check whether I screwed up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com