Enterprise COBOL is both a liability and an asset. There's tangible value hidden in the code.

See https://github.com/slott56/looking-at-cobol

I've tweaked the presentation a little.

The essential ingredients in coping with COBOL are these:

• Use something like Stingray Reader to parse COBOL DDE's and process the data …

My literate programming tool, pyWeb, has moved to version 3.1 -- supporting modern Python.

Next up, version 3.2. This is a massive reworking of the data structures involved. The rework lets me use Jinja2 for templates. There's a lot of fiddliness to getting the end-of-line spacing right. Jinja has …

As noted in My Shifting Understanding and A Terrible Design Mistake, I had a design that focused on serialization instead of proper modeling of the objects in question.

Specifically, I didn't start with a suitable abstract syntax tree (AST) structure. I started with an algorithmic view of "weaving" and "tangling …

I've been fascinated by Literate Programming forever.

I have two utterly divergent takes on this.

See https://github.com/slott56/PyLit-3 for one.

See https://github.com/slott56/py-web-tool for another.

And yet, I've still done a really bad design job. Before we get to the design, a little bit …

When writing about code in LaTeX, the essential strategy is to use an environment to format the code so it stands out from surrounding text. There are a few of these environments available as LaTeX add-on packages. The three popular ones are:

• verbatim. I think this is built-in to LaTeX …

Here's the code.

def get_categories(file):
    """
    Get categories.
    """
    verify_file(file)

    categories = set()

    with open(file, "r") as cat_file:
        while line := cat_file.readline().rstrip():
            categories.add(line)

    return categories

To me this was terrible. truly and deeply horrifying. Let me count the ways.

1. The docstring repeats the name of the function …

It may help to read Python is a Bad Programming Language, but it's not very useful.

I shouldn't be tempted by click-bait headlines. But. I am drawn in by bad articles on Python.

In particular, any post claiming Python is deficient causes me to look for the concrete PEP's that …

In Static Site Blues I was wringing my hands over ways to convert a ton of content from a two different proprietary tools (the very old iWeb, and the merely old Sandvox) into something I could work with.

After a bit of fiddling around, I'm delighted with Pelican.

First, of …

I have a very large, static site with 10+ years of stuff about my boat. Most of it is pretty boring. http://www.itmaybeahack.com/TeamRedCruising/

I started with iWeb. It was very -- well -- 2000-ish look and feel. Too many pastels and lines and borders.

In 2012, I switched to …

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 …