Sometimes we call them "Belt and Braces" solutions. As a former suspenders person who switched to belts, the idea of wearing both is a little like over-engineering. In the unlikely event of catastrophic failure of one system, your pants can still remain properly hoist. There's a weird, but defensible reason …

Consider the following code

def max(m: int, n: int) -> int:
    if m >= n:
        return m
    elif n >= m:
        return n
    else:
        raise Exception(f"Design Error: {vars()}")

There's a question about else: clause and the exception raised there.

• It's impossible. In this specific case, a little algebra can provide …

In the mailbag I found this nonsense, doomed to inevitable failure:

"As I get more serious about this data science stuff, it has become obvious that a windows machine is not the way to go. ... Q1: What other things should I think about and consider while shopping for a new …

Here's a snippet of an email

In big data / data science, the curse of dimensionality keeps showing up over and over. A good place to start is the wiki article “curse of dimensionality.” The issue seems to be that a lot of these big data / data science people have not …

See this short discussion on a Stingray Reader feature:

https://sourceforge.net/p/stingrayreader/discussion/COBOL/thread/d2132851/?limit=25#2a3a

This turned into an exercise in pure TDD.

<rant>

I'm not a fan of applying TDD in a strict, death-march fashion.

I see the comments on Stack Overflow that …

Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse... I had a great chance to do some Test-Driven Reverse Engineering on a rather complex C program. I extracted test cases. I worked with the users to gather test cases. And I rewrote their legacy app …

Somewhere, I have a vague recollection of reading advice from someone (Bill Gates?) that it takes three versions to get things right. The context may have been a justification of the wild success of Windows 3.0.

Or, I could be just making it up.

But one thing I have …

Just stumbled across several blog postings on unit test naming.

Essentially the TestCase will name the fixture. That's pretty easy to understand.

The cool part is this: each test method is a two-part clause: condition_"should"_result or "when"_condition_"then"_result.

See https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Unit …

For the 757 Python Meetup group, someone proposed looking at some Python code they had which was slow. The code implemented a variation on the Elo chess rating system. It applied the ratings to other sports, and used the points scored as well as basic win/lose/tie to work …