[wwfn]

Tangential (but topical in that "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing" is also on the front page):

Is the generated python code in the example wrong?

The prompt

> Develop a Python function that removes any falsey values from a list. Return the modified list without creating a new one.

Is answered with list comprehension, which makes a new list and leaves the original unmodified (never mind that the *args input necessarily can't be a modifiable list?)

   def remove_falsey_values(*args): return [val for val in args if val]

Whereas I'd expect something like

    def remove_falsey_values(l):
          for i in reversed(range(len(l))):
               if not l[i]: l.pop(i)
          # returned list is linked to input l 
          return l

    a = [1, 0, False, 'foo']
    x = remove_falsey_values(a)
    x[0] = 2
    print(a) # [2,'foo']

[hecanjog]

It doesn't fit the requirement to modify the list in place, but the prompt itself contradicts the requirements by asking explicitly for the implementation to use *args and a list comprehension.

[wwfn]

Ahh I didn't see the full original prompt -- it's overflowing into a horz scroll for me. I thought it was the "critique loop" that injected the *args requirement. I guess garbage in, garbage out. Still unfortunate example to use.

[__s]

    def remove_falsey_values(l):
          l[:] = (x for x in l if x)

[desideratum]

Oh I wouldn't be surprised. This is a sample from one of the OSS code datasets I'd used, which are all generated synthetically using LLMs. Data is indeed the moat.

[nusl]

Why would you modify the original list and return it with the second example? Honestly the first is better

[highphive]

The question isn't really what's better practice, the question is whether the code follows the prompt. The first example does not.

[semiinfinitely]

your second function is the type of bad code you get from people trying to program python like its c

[ktm5j]

Is there a pythonic way to satisfy the prompt? IE without making a new list?

[nomel]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652757

[wwfn]

Absolutely! And the list.pop version is multiple orders of magnitude slower. But I took the prompt to be asking for in-place modification of the existing list. Comprehension does not do that.