Numbers in Python

Sun 26 April 2020 by Moshe Zadka

Numbers in Python come in all shapes and forms. The reason different kind of representations of numbers exist is because they all have different trade-offs. These trade-offs are often surprising!

Integers

The most surprising things about integers is how easily they stop being integers. Dividing two integers, for example, 4 …

read more

Goodbye, John H. Conway

Tue 21 April 2020 by Moshe Zadka

John H. Conway passed away ten days ago, and I think it's only now I can write a proper eulogy.

I was first introduced to his work, if not his name, when I was at the end of elementary school. I am sure everyone has heard about the Game of …

read more

Using Twisted to Massively Parallelize Web Clients

Mon 13 April 2020 by Moshe Zadka

The Twisted Requests (treq) package is an HTTP client built on the popular Twisted library that is used for web requests. Async libraries offer the ability to do large amounts of network requests in parallel with relatively little CPU impact. This can be useful in HTTP clients that need to …

read more

Comfort with Small Mistakes

Sat 04 April 2020 by Moshe Zadka

It has been a long time since I learned how to program, and it is easy to forget some of the hard-won lessons in the beginning. Easy until I try to teach people to program. There is a lot of accidental and inherent complexity in programming, but I am ready …

read more

Or else:

Thu 12 March 2020 by Moshe Zadka

This was originally sent to my newsletter. I send one e-mail, always about Python, every other Sunday. If this blog post interests you, consider subscribing.

The underappreciated else keyword in Python has three distinct uses.

if/else

On an if statement, else will contain code that runs if the condition …

read more

Forks and Threats

Wed 19 February 2020 by Moshe Zadka

What is a threat? From a game-theoretical perspective, a threat is an attempt to get a better result by saying: "if you do not give me this result, I will do something that is bad for both of us". Note that it has to be bad for both sides: if …

read more

Meditations on the Zen of Python

Mon 30 December 2019 by Moshe Zadka

(This is based on the series published in opensource.com as 9 articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Python contributor Tim Peters introduced us to the Zen of Python in 1999. Twenty years later, its 19 guiding principles continue to be relevant within the community.

The …

read more

Precise Unit Tests with PyHamcrest

Tue 17 December 2019 by Moshe Zadka

(This is based on my article on opensource.com)

Unit test suites help maintain high-quality products by signaling problems early in the development process. An effective unit test catches bugs before the code has left the developer machine, or at least in a continuous integration environment on a dedicated branch …

read more

Raise Better Exceptions in Python

Sun 17 November 2019 by Moshe Zadka

There is a lot of Python code in the wild which does something like:

raise ValueError("Could not fraz the buzz:"
                 f"{foo} is less than {quux}")

This is, in general, a bad idea. It does not matter if the exception is fairly generic, like ValueError or specific like CustomFormatParsingException …

read more

An introduction to zope.interface

Thu 17 October 2019 by Moshe Zadka

This has previously been published on opensource.com.

The Zen of Python is loose enough and contradicts itself enough that you can prove anything from it. Let's meditate upon one of its most famous principles: "Explicit is better than implicit."

One thing that traditionally has been implicit in Python is …

read more