addaon 5 days ago

Title of the article is "How…", not "Why…", and "why" is not discussed. (My understanding is that the "why" is "because the implementation acted that way without an official guarantee, and folks depended on the implementation detail, so it became guaranteed.)

  • DemocracyFTW2 5 days ago

    I don't think this is the "why". What you're depicting is what happened in JavaScript. Dictionary keys in Python always had that (to me) annoying property that they preserved insertion order until they don't. I'd frankly much prefer if they'd always be iterated in random order each time they're traversed.

    • not_kurt_godel 5 hours ago

      I'd love to see the results of mandating a random order dict impl at an actual company/org (but hate to be forced to participate). Hopefully you hired developers who really like to write sorting algos.

      • nielsbot 5 hours ago

        Swift (heavily used by Apple) has randomly ordered dictionaries for security:

        > In particular, random seeding enables better protection against (accidental or deliberate) hash-flooding attacks

        https://forums.swift.org/t/psa-the-stdlib-now-uses-randomly-...

      • yxhuvud 5 hours ago

        Well, that is how hash tables in go works, so you'd not have to look that far.

        • tasty_freeze 5 hours ago

          Perl since 5.8.something has had the option of perturbing the hash function, so it is different from run to run. You can also set the set to a given value in order to lock in the sequence.

          In any case, it is not ordered. If you want that, you have to explicitly sort the keys of the hash.

        • not_kurt_godel 5 hours ago

          Great. Maybe GP will go a step farther and also mandate arrays that return elements in random order too. Relying on insertion order for any reason is for weaklings.

  • snthpy an hour ago

    Thanks, How makes much more sense. The post title is dumb.

    Why is Hackernews news for hackers?

DemocracyFTW2 5 days ago

Wrong title, article has "How Does Python’s OrderedDict Maintain Order?"