I made some bad decisions when I wrote this a few years ago: https://github.com/slott56/Stingray-Reader. Really bad. And. Recently, I've burdened myself with conflicting goals. Ugh.

I need to upgrade to Python 3.8, and add type hints. This exposed somes badness.

See Stingray Reader Rewrite for …

This seemed like an interesting problem. I hope this isn't someone's take-home homework or an interview question. It seemed organic enough when I found out about it.

Given a document like this...

doc = {
    "key": "the key",
    "tag1": ["list", "of", "values"],
    "tag2": ["another", "list", "here"],
    "tag3": ["lorem", "ipsum", "dolor"],
}

We want …

Using the clear() method of a dict isn't *wrong*. But. The reasons have to be investigated. I got a question about this code not working "properly." ("Properly"? Seems too vague to be useful.)

Here's a summary of the example.

final_list = []
temp_dict = {}
for obj in some_source:
    cool_function(obj, temp_dict)
    final_list.append …

See {filename}/blog/2020/01/2020_01_26-stingrayreader_upgrade.rst

This drifted into some serious rethinking of bad design decisions. (If someone else did this, I'd call it weak, and suggest improvements. It was me. It was bad. I'm a bad programmer and I feel bad about it.)

An an example, there's this …

some_data = {name: source[name] for name in the_names}
the_object = SomeClass(**some_data)

For the last week I've been working with some legacy code that reveals a kind of problem I hadn't really seen before.

I'm calling it the Wrong Abstraction.

I want to contrast this with the Leaky Abstraction, where implementation details are revealed and raise havoc.

The Wrong Abstraction problem seems …

See "Additional, Related Content". It's one of the posts here: https://www.patreon.com/slott.

I think there's space for a Building Skills in Functional Python title next to the Building Skills in OO Design.

See https://github.com/slott56/cpx-xmas-ornament You'll need a Circuit Playground Express https://www.adafruit.com/product/3333 Install the code. Enjoy the noise and blinky lights. The MML translation isn't as complete as you might like. The upper/lower case for the various commands isn't handled quite as cleanly …

>>> t_s = (8063599, 0)
>>> fields = [(t_s := divmod(t_s[0], b))[1] for b in (60, 60, 24, 7)]
>>> list(reversed(fields + [t_s[0]]))
[13, 2, 7, 53, 19]

I've recorded two courses for LinkedIn Learning https://www.linkedin.com/learning/me

Let me emphasize that their production values take a lot of work. While I think I'm a pretty good live presenter, a few days in the recording booth with a producer, reveals all my weaknesses. so. um …