I've been an on-and-off user of LaTeX since the very, very beginning. Back in the dark days when the one laser printer that could render the images was in a closely-guarded secret location to prevent everyone from using it and exhausting the (expensive) toner cartridges.

A consequence of this is …

I was asked to review code that -- well -- was evil.

Not like "shabby" or "non-pythonic". Nothing so simple as that.

We'll get to the evil in a moment. First, we have to suffer two horrible indignities.

1. Busy Waiting
2. Undefined Post-Conditions.

We'll beat all three issues to death separately, starting with …

Looking at code. Came to a 20-line block of code that did exactly this.

sorted(Path.cwd().glob("some_pattern[1-9]*.*"), reverse=True)

Twenty lines. Seriously.

To be fair, 8 of the 20 lines were comments. 3 were blank. Which leaves 9 lines of code to perform the task of a …

Nowadays, we don't have the same compelling reasons to test a random number generator. The intervening decades have seen a lot of fruitful research. Good algorithms.

Looking back to my 1968 self, however, I still feel a need to work out the solution to an old problem. See The Old …

See The Old Days -- ca. 1974 Random Numbers Before Python for some background.

We'll get to Python after reminiscing about the olden days. I want to provide some back story on why sympy has had a huge impact on ordinary hacks like myself.

What we're talking about is how we …

See "The Old Old Days -- ca. 1968" for my first exposure to an actual computer. Nothing about Python there. But. It's what motivated me to get started learning to code -- I was fascinated by games that involved randomization. Games with cards or dice.

After filling in a little background, I …

As the olds do, I reminisce sometimes. Not often. Let me rewind the memory tapes a back to 1967 or '68.

(What a dumb metaphor for folks who have never used serial storage.)

This isn't -- directly -- about Python. But it may help folks who live at the edge of programming …

Here are some links to reviews: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1801077266/ref=cm_cr_unknown?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=1#reviews-filter-bar

https://www.amazon.ca/product-reviews/1801077266/ref=acr_dp_hist_3?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=three_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

These are reviews of Python Object-Oriented Programming: Build robust and maintainable object-oriented …

Apple's freebie tools -- Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, etc. -- are wonderful things. I really like Numbers. I'm tolerant of Pages. I've used Pages to write books and publish them to the Apple Bookstore. (Shameless Plug: Pivot to Python.)

These tools have a significant problem. Protobuf.

See Spreadsheets, COBOL, and schema-driven file processing, etc. for some history on this project.

Also, see Stingray-Reader for the current state of this effort.

(This started almost 20 years ago, I've been refining and revising a lot.)