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 …

Stand-alone document files for tech writing are awful. They should not be used as widely as they are.

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.

Want a book with dozens of project ideas?

Each has a description, and approach, and deliverables. It's a lot like ordinary development work, but with some detailed guidance from the author. (And no deadline imposed by your team lead or manager.)

These are projects you can do. You can post …

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 …