Consider, for a moment, the shelve and dbm packages for storing things in a “database.” Built-in. Lightweight. The database is essentially a mapping from identifiers to objects. It can be quite nice.

The shelve module directly puts Python objects in a file. It’s an ideal database structure for Python …

I saw a confusing post on https://fosstodon.org.

I won't link to it, but I will quote it because it repeats some common misconceptions.

I have some iterator chain (in reality longer and more complex than this example).
And now in one or more steps, I need to add …

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 …

See https://writing.peercy.net/p/python-quirks

Superficially, most of these are true.

Looking a little more deeply, most of them are also presented in a somewhat misleading way. A few set up a good punch-line. The Inheritance one, for example, is funny.

If the point is to force a …

I want to call out two huge problems with Python. I'm not the first to point these out, but they've been bothering me for a while.

1. Surprising Changes
2. Dependency Hell

I've provided them here to save folks from repeating these. They're now officially "known" and there's no point in repeating …

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

And https://pypi.org/project/py-web-lp/

I finally made the PyWeb LP tool installable from PyPI.

I need to fix the name of the GitHub repo (some day) to make it also say py-web-lp. I should also fixup my tag cloud to say pyweblp …

The typing module includes the mysterious-looking Annotated type hint. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.Annotated for details.

What does this do?

Why do I need it?

Where can I see examples?

This was a surprising thing (for me) to see. Surprising because -- after writing a book about functional programming, I'd forgotten that some of the ideas are actually really new to people.

(I've omitted the source of the quote because I want to reuse this without worrying about link rot. Some …

Central to OO design is "encapsulation." It's so central it is part of several separate principles.

In the S. O. L. I. D. design principles it's the Interface Segregation Principle. And a significant part of the Single Responsibility Principle.

In some cases, Python n00bz -- folks who already know some OO …