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 …

See "The Old Old Days -- ca. 1968" for my first exposure to an actual computer. Nothing about Python there. But. It's what motivated me to get started learning to code -- I was fascinated by games that involved randomization. Games with cards or dice.

After filling in a little background, I …

Here are some links to reviews: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1801077266/ref=cm_cr_unknown?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=1#reviews-filter-bar

https://www.amazon.ca/product-reviews/1801077266/ref=acr_dp_hist_3?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=three_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

These are reviews of Python Object-Oriented Programming: Build robust and maintainable object-oriented …

Apple's freebie tools -- Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, etc. -- are wonderful things. I really like Numbers. I'm tolerant of Pages. I've used Pages to write books and publish them to the Apple Bookstore. (Shameless Plug: Pivot to Python.)

These tools have a significant problem. Protobuf.

See Spreadsheets, COBOL, and schema-driven file processing, etc. for some history on this project.

Also, see Stingray-Reader for the current state of this effort.

(This started almost 20 years ago, I've been refining and revising a lot.)

As an author with many books on Python, I'm captivated by people's hot takes on why Python is so epically bad. Really Bad. Uselessly Bad. Profoundly Broken. etc.

I'll provide some hints on topics that get repeated a lot. If you really need to write a blog post about how …

I'll get to legacy software. First, however, some backstory on observability.

Sailors will sometimes create "Float Plans". Like aircraft flight plans, they have an itinerary to make it slightly easier to find us when something goes wrong. Unlike airspace, which is tightly controlled by the FAA, the seas are more-or-less …