We have three major tiers of configuration for applications. Within each tier, we have sub-tiers, larding on yet more complexity. The organization of the layers is a bit fungible, too. Making good choices can be rather complex because there are so many variations on the theme of "configuration". The desktop …

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 …

The context is an ongoing question about optimization -- not my strong suit -- and the SciPy algorithms for this. See Scipy.optimization.anneal Problems for some additional confusion over simple things.

The new quote is this:

However, firing up Python, NumPy, SciPy and figuring out which solver to use is not …

Read this: The Most Diabolical Python Antipattern. Now you've been told. You no longer have any excuses. [Link fixed.]

Three terms that seem to cause confusion: Idempotence, Hysteresis and Deterministic. The subject came up during my webcast on the Five Kinds of Python Functions. We can use all three terms to describe a function. Two of them are relevant to common design questions in software. The third is a …

Be there: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/e/3255

Of course, I've got too many slides. 58 slides for a 60 minute presentation. That's really about 2 hours of material. Unless people have questions, then it's a half-day seminar.

Seriously.

I think I've gone waaaay too far on this. But …

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 …

See http://www.pythonchallenge.com

Addicting. For folks (like me) who like this kind of thing. For others, perhaps just dumb. Or infuriating.

Years ago -- many, many years ago -- I vaguely remember a similar game with a name like "insanity" or something like that. Now there's http://www.notpron.com …

http://sophieclayton.github.io/2015-01-15-uw/novice/python/index.html A very nice tutorial. It's Focused on a specific problem. It covers the solution technology in some depth. I think the focus and depth features are important. It's often tempting to cover the technical features without really solving a problem. In …

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 …