New from Packt Publishing: Functional Python Programming. Also here on Amazon. The fun part is covering generator functions, iterators, and higher-order functions in some real depth. There's a lot of powerful programming techniques available. What's challenging is reconciling Python's approach to FP with languages that are purely functional like Haskell …

In the forthcoming Functional Python Programming (https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/functional-python-programming) I was pressured by one of the technical reviewers to create a better example of composite function creation with decorators.

This was a difficult request. First, of course, "better" is poorly defined. More importantly, the example in the …

I'm working on yet another Python book. This one looking at functional programming in Python. It doesn't really go with with Mastering Object-Oriented Python and Python for Secret Agents because the focus isn't on Python's strong suit.

In chapter one, a reviewer had this two-word question: "yield from?"

What? What …

Old. But still interesting. Partial Function Application is not Currying It seems like hair-splitting. However, the distinction between bound variables and curried functions does have some practical implications. I'm looking closely at PyMonad and the built-in functools library. I'm finding some benefits in understanding functional programming and how to apply …

See Apache Log Parsing for the background.

Here's a generator function which expands a simple Access to be a more detailed named tuple.

Access_Details= namedtuple( 'Access_Details',
    ['access', 'time', 'method', 'url', 'protocol'] )

def details_iter( iterable ):
    def parse_time_linux( ts ):
        return datetime.datetime.strptime( ts, "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z" )

    def …

How much do I love Python? Consider this little snippet that parses Apache logs.

import re
from collections import defaultdict, named tuple

format_pat= re.compile(
   r"(?P<host>[\d\.]+)\s"
   r"(?P<identity>\S*)\s"
   r"(?P<user>\S*)\s"
   r"\[(?P<time>.*?)\]\s"
   r'"(?P<request>.*?)"\s'
   r"(?P …

Read this: "Here Comes Functional Programming" by Larry O'Brien in SD Times.

people who should know better continue to assert that statically typed languages are "safer, because the compiler can catch errors that otherwise wouldn't show up until runtime." While it's true a statically typed language can detect that you've …

My laptop chartplotter software (GPSNavX) is marvelous for visualizing a route. But, there are elements to route planning that it doesn't handle gracefully.

Specifically, it doesn't provide useful elapsed time calculation at all. While the TTG and ETA (Time to Go and Estimated Time of Arrival) for the next waypoint …

As a hypothetical, I was asked about doing Oracle Analytic functions in Python.

[Sidebar: Politics. The question came from a DBA in a C# shop. That's why it's just hypothetical. Politically, they could never make use of this information. In C# world, Functional Programming is often scary and evil. It …