Comment by nvlled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nvlled | Hacker News Reader

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> The unintuitive part is that this works in the first place and doesn't throw an error

What the hell? So you do agree that it's unintuitive but the supporting points you keep giving are completely, utterly tangential. That's what I have been saying all this time, that it's unintuitive, what you are even disagreeing with me for? The analogy?

I repeat this once again, I made the analogy to simplify and make it clear because some responses seems to miss it. I've already addressed your points, but you keep giving back the same supposed rebuttal, different words but same meaning. Nothing about what you say invalidates the analogy.

> But if you know about this unintuitive feature and are relying on it instead of accessing the fields by their fully qualified names, then you should already have a gnawing feeling that asks you "what happens when there are conflicts?" (and the answer is - it does the intuitive thing)

If you are deeply aware of the quirks, intuition no longer applies. You rely on intuition when you are in an unfamiliar situation. So again, nothing what you said just now supports any of your argument, whatever it is.

> you do agree that it's unintuitive

You should really pay more attention to precision of wording and the meaning that it carries, because you keep mixing up different things into one big pile of hand-waving and equating things that are not equal :)

There is no single "it" here. There are two different behaviors here. One is intuitive. One is not. We were discussing the former one. The analogy was about the former one. And the analogy was imprecise and misleading, completely losing different levels of nesting which is the whole point - that's what makes this behavior (short-hand selection when names conflicts - NOT short-hand selection in general) intuitive.

> If you are deeply aware of the quirks, intuition no longer applies. You rely on intuition when you are in an unfamiliar situation

I agree! And what I'm saying is: if you rely on intuition and you don't know about the selector mechanism at all - you will explicitly write out this nested level to access the second-level nested variable (c.Nested.X) and side-step the issue altogether, and accessing the first-level nested variable (c.X) will get you first-level nested variable exactly as you would expect. That's the behavior. That's what we're discussing here. That's what the article is about. That's what everyone calls intuitive - it's not about the short-hand selection itself (which, as I said - is unintuitive, but will not shoot you in the foot, unless you really try).

I don't think I'm getting my point across though, so I suggest we wrap it up here.

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