There are many good reasons to use shell scripts. Mostly, a script can be useful when it's an alias that launches an application. Beyond that, I have doubts.

I wasted three days because I refused to get a grip on how matplotlib really works.

Most of the time, folks like me are happy and successful using the pyplot module. The Quickstart provides brilliant, working examples.

As my partner's grandfather used to say, "We're off to the races in …

I'm sick of reading about THE Ternary Operator.

There is not merely a single operator that is ternary. There are many operators that are ternary.

Here's one example:

>>> 6+1 >= 6 >= 6-1

The >= >= operator is ternary. It has 3 operands. Count them.

There are a 36 of these ternary operators …

This is a disheartening thing to read

As someone who doesn't do a ton of JSON parsing on the command line, I tend to forget jq syntax.

Two tools I really like are gron (make JSON greppable) from @tomnomnom and jqp ..., which provides a "tui playground for exploring jq."

98 …

See Python 3.12: what didn't make the headlines. This is very helpful.

It is a great list of 7 key features of Python 3.12.

With one tiny point I need to object to.

A "Dice Mechanic"? Yes. The thing you do with the dice to determine an outcome. We'll use Python to see how the dice shake out.

This is a great question.

https://fosstodon.org/@JustineSmithies/110979871574705636

This works, they said.

echo -en "Firefox\0icon\x1fweechat" | fuzzel -d -w 100 -l 10

But. The superficial switch to subprocess.Popen() doesn't work.

Why?

The way echo works varies from shell to shell. When MacOSX changes to zsh, things …

Stuff I found on the internet that I have to disagree with.

(And no, I didn't ask for clarification. If the author posts things without supporting details it suggests they might lack the supporting details. I can be charitable and assume they don't really care about providing useful information, but …

See https://writing.peercy.net/p/python-quirks

Superficially, most of these are true.

Looking a little more deeply, most of them are also presented in a somewhat misleading way. A few set up a good punch-line. The Inheritance one, for example, is funny.

If the point is to force a …

I want to call out two huge problems with Python. I'm not the first to point these out, but they've been bothering me for a while.

1. Surprising Changes
2. Dependency Hell

I've provided them here to save folks from repeating these. They're now officially "known" and there's no point in repeating …