When I talk about functional programming in Python, folks like to look for place where functional programming isn't appropriate. They latch onto finite-state automata (FSA) because "state" of an automata doesn't seem to fit with stateless objects used in functional programming.

This is a false dichotomy.

It's emphatically false in …

The issue of permutations and combinations is sometimes funny.

Not funny weird. But, funny "haha."

I received an email with 100's of words and 10 attachments. (10. Really.) The subject was how best to enumerate 6! permutations of something or other. With a goal of comparing some optimization algorithm with …

See Obstinate Idiocy for some background.

Here are three warning signs I was able to deduce.

• No Rational Justification
• Ineffective Tool Choice
• Random Whining

To which I can now add two more.

Symptom 4 of Obstinate Idiocy is that all questions are rhetorical and they often come with pre-argued answers …

Here's how to recognize a Faerie Dust request:

1. We have identified a problem. It can be with almost anything: scalability, reliability, auditability, any Quality Measure.
2. We're pursuing a specific technology. Typically, something that has the lowest impact on our architecture.
3. We can't address anything other than this specific technology variation …

This isn't about details of pySpark. This is about the philosophy of testing when working with a large, complex framework, like pySpark, pandas, numpy, or whatever.

I got this the other day: "there seems to be a lot of buzz out in the general public regarding software bugs".

Attached to this was an article from The Economist in 2003 plus one from 2010. To me, this doesn't seem to be a "lot" of buzz. But what …

See https://towardsdatascience.com/building-generator-pipelines-in-python-8931535792ff

I'm delighted by this article.

I was shown only the first, horrible, example. I think the idea was to push back on the idea of complex generators. I fumed.

Then I read the entire article.

Now I'm fuming at someone who posted the first example …

I've been trying to help some folks who have a "search" algorithm that's slow.

They know it's slow -- that's pretty obvious.

They're -- unfortunately -- sure that asyncio will help. That's not an obvious conclusion. It involves no useful research. Indeed, that's a kind of magical thinking. Which leads me to consider …

This is bonus content for the forthcoming Functional Python Programming 3rd edition book. It didn't make it into the book because -- well -- it was just too much of the wrong kind of detail.

See this "Tough TCO" document for some thoughts on Tail-Call Optimization that can be particularly difficult. This …

I started with the Apple Books platform because it's an easy default for me.