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 …

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 …