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the advent of code last year and used no fewer than 12 counters in my solutions to 25 puzzles and that total could well increase since i haven t finished yet the talk itself is on github metaphormers 2018 05 30 self talks comments a metaphor is a figure of speech where you describe something in terms of something else for example when katy perry sings baby you re a firework she doesn t mean you re an explosive for use on bonfire night she s saying you ve got a spark inside you you should ignite the light show em what you re worth shoot across the sky and make em go oh oh oh you re spectacular a firework this post considers some metaphors for computer programming i hope we can gain some insights into what we do by looking at it from a different angle in other words what are we like we write software that s not a metaphor though it s literally what we do we write edit review and publish texts in scrum teams we even work on stories it s not particularly helpful it s not unhelpful either unlike the next couple of examples for which i blame recruitment agents an advert for a programming ninja isn t meant to attract a japanese mercenary trained in espionage and assassination must have 2 years php experience it s meant to make a dull job sound exciting similarly a rockstar is unwelcome on most software teams creativity and even attitude may be useful not so the rampant ego and trantrums how about sports we re agile we work in teams on sprints scoring story points in our scrum meetings we discuss tactics is coding like cooking we assemble the right ingredients and follow tried and trusted recipes our products are consumed and adjusted to taste based on feedback software grows organically tending to a codebase is a form of gardening we nurture new features and allow them to blossom all the while pruning dead code and trying to keep bugs under control release cycles are seasonal success depends on both weather and climate if computer science is the discipline the art of computer programming supplies the detail and the practice is often described as a craft there s a progression from journeyman to master during which we learn the tools of our trade although end users may never see the elegant code which underpins the interface they use we take pride in our work and like to think they can sense our attention to detail the most popular metaphor is construction it s there in our job titles architect project manager engineer we plan assemble build test deliver unfortunately this metaphor fails to recognise the supple fluid nature of software its softness if you re building a house you start with foundations and then the walls go up at which point it becomes impossible to change the foundations if you re building software you could start with the wiring and then put the roof on there s nothing stopping you swapping the foundations at any point running on another platform or switching the memory manager for example is no more difficult than changing the user interface styling or consider a software service supported by a collaboration of microservices which are continually developed reconfigured replaced that s not construction it s communication communication is the metaphor i m going to champion code communicates via compiler or interpreter with the platform it communicates with us via editor and browser we use text pictures speech gestures we share rooms screens thoughts we listen to our users we engage with our community at the start of this post i dismissed writing as too literal beyond the literal and beneath the words it s evident we re in the language business not just programming languages but also the dialect of our apis and modules the metaphors which describe and define our designs design patterns are simply shared metaphor factory visitor facade and a codebase communicates by shaping and extending its own local metaphors software is the development of metaphor we are metaphormers as katy perry would say oh oh oh the icons used on this page were downloaded from http glyphicons com and are licensed under the cc by 3 0 terms creating a dict of lists in python 2018 04 29 python streams comments suppose you have a list of objects which you want to convert into a dict mapping from some object key to the sub list of objects with that key to provide a simple example let s start with a list of fruits from collections import namedtuple fruit namedtuple fruit name colour def banana return fruit banana yellow def grape return fruit grape green def pear return fruit pear green def strawberry return fruit strawberry red def cherry return fruit cherry red fruits banana pear cherry cherry pear grape banana grape cherry grape strawberry pear grape cherry we d like to arrange a fruitbowl a dict which groups fruits by colour this can be done by creating an empty bowl then iterating through the fruits placing each in the correct list fruitbowl for fruit in fruits fruitbowl setdefault fruit colour append fruit dict setdefault is a bit of an oddity in python both doing something and returning a value but it s a convenient shorthand in this case despite this convenience it s more common to use a defaultdict from collections import defaultdict fruitbowl defaultdict list for fruit in fruits fruitbowl fruit colour append fruit here s a function to display the fruitbowl def print_bowl bowl print n join format colour join f name for f in fruits for colour fruits in bowl items if we call this function we see the fruits have indeed been grouped by colour print_bowl fruitbowl yellow banana banana green pear pear grape grape grape pear grape red cherry cherry cherry strawberry cherry this is all fine and idiomatic python but whenever i see an empty dict being created followed by a loop to populate it i wonder if a comprehension could be used is there a way to declare and initialise the dict in a single expression here s the best i came up with from operator import attrgetter from itertools import groupby colour attrgetter colour fruitbowl col list fts for col fts in groupby sorted fruits key colour colour is this better than the defaultdict solution probably not but it s a technique worth remembering maybe the fruitbowl isn t needed and we actually just need to iterate through the fruits grouped by colour for example which colour is most popular max fruitbowl items key lambda kv len kv 1 0 green using groupby we don t need the bowl def grouplen k_gp return sum 1 for _ in k_gp 1 max groupby sorted fruits key colour colour key grouplen 0 green in this case we don t need groupby either there is more than one way to do it from collections import counter counter map colour fruits most_common 1 green 7 timtowtdi vs tsbo apoo owtdi 2018 04 19 python perl comments timtowtdi timtowtdi stands for there is more than one way to do it an approach promoted by the perl community the mindset behind it gets explored in more detail by the language s creator larry wall in a talk given in 1999 perl the first postmodern computer language he attributes the slogan to his daughter heidi who says it s a strategy which works well in her maths class and she associates it with another saying used at school tsall good this doesn t mean everything is good or even everything has good bits it means overall things are good see the big picture perl epitomises this it s eclectic and inclusive supporting a variety of styles one liner fine like a shell script sure structured programming object oriented functional why not tsall good i like that but do i feel that way about programming tsbo apoo owtdi a contrasting mantra appears in the zen of python a list of aphorisms which summarise the guiding principles behind python s design item number 13 states there should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it perhaps realising this sounds overly prescriptive this rule is tempered by item 14 although that way may not be obvious at first unless you re dutch guido van rossum python s bdfl benevolent dictator for life would be the dutch person who finds things obvious that s right dictator programmers don t like being told what to do any more than two year olds how then has python become so popular maybe emphasis falls on should there should be only one obvious way to do it it s just that dutch or otherwise we haven t got there yet timtop for example there is more than one python obviously there s python 2 and python 3 but it s less obvious which to use don t forget pypy increasingly python comes packaged with data processing and visualisation extensions served up as a jupyter notebook timtopom there is more than one program options module when i started with python there was getopt the one and only command line handler coming from a c c background i was quite happy to use something resembling gnu s getopt then optparse appeared now there s argparse all of these libraries are readily available which should i use not optparse that s deprecated unless i m already using it and it works that is regarding the other contenders the documentation archly notes users who are unfamiliar with the c getopt function or who would like to write less code and get better help and error messages should consider using the argparse module instead there are other non standard python options for parsing a command line too ones which generate code from the usage notes or by inspecting the code you want to expose there is more than one way to do it timtoutf there is more than one unit test framework the obvious one unittest like getopt draws inspiration from elsewhere in this case java s junit unfortunately the port is too faithful and you ll have to inherit from super classes etc to test something i much prefer pytest which flexes the language itself to deliver test assertions as assert s there s also a doctest module in the standard library which executes and checks code found in strings hold that thought and there are many other non standard testing frameworks there is more than one way to do it timtowofs there is more than one way of formatting strings as we ve seen there s more than one python and libraries are always up for reinvention this is arguably evolution rather than a multiplicity of options that is the most recent way to do it should be preferred when it comes to string formatting though there has always been more than one way to do it and more ways are still being added do you use single or double quotes for a string triple quotes raw strings raw with an r or raw with an r timtowtdi what if you want to embed the value of a variable in a string users familiar with c s printf function might prefer formatting fans of shell parameter expansion can use template strings advanced string formatting str format appeared in python 3 0 backported to python 2 6 no doubt it has advantages over formatting but for me it s a little more obscure and a little less obvious python 3 6 introduces f strings which build on str format and knock down my reservations the syntax allows you to evaluate expressions in strings evidently python is heading in perl s direction apsdotadiw let s finish by returning to perl and to larry wall s 1999 talk how many times have we heard the mantra that a program should do one thing and do it well perl is not that program perl wants to do everything well it integrates features and makes no attempt to homogenise them you ve all heard the saying if all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail perl is no hammer it has memorably been described as a swiss army chainsaw but larry wall likens it to a more conventional tool if all you have is duct tape everything starts to look like a duct right when s the last time you used duct tape on a duct python may aspire to offer a single obvious way to do something it fails splendidly being more duct tape than hammer i presented this blog post as a lightning talk at pydiff a couple of days ago the slides are here the talk was recorded too i appear about 24 minutes in ddd wales 2018 2018 03 25 self swansea comments the first ever ddd wales was held yesterday at techhub swansea it was a free to attend one day event comprising 5 full one hour sessions split into 3 parallel tracks that makes 15 sessions to choose from additionally there were lightning talks in the lunch break wow what a day time for some rest thank you again to all our amazing sponsors exhibitors speakers attendees and venue see you next year dddwales ddd wales dddcymru march 24 2018 i enjoyed kevin jones introduction to kotlin the more so since it was almost entirely coded live kevin ably demonstrated kotlin to be java without the ceremony i could see connections with other modern compiled languages swift for example languages which aren t feature shy but which aim for a light clean syntax languages which build on existing systems and libraries it was interesting to see his use of the jetbrains ide as a teaching aid and indeed to pick up on audience thoughts on the use of ides to flesh out code chris cundill s talk on release flow was another highlight you may not have heard of release flow but you ll know what it is a tried and tested strategy for code branching chris used his talk to challenge and call out some more recent alternatives gitflow being the prime target the session got me thinking one dimension chris didn t cover was people personalities roles and permissions who can merge to which branch which developers work in private then push bulk updates git has won the version control system battle the fight has moved into surrounding areas branching merging reviewing continuous integration and the competition is bringing improvements in tooling and best practice the final talk i attended was david carboni s session on creating a minimal docker container to run a microservice written in go david started off by explaining why simplicity matters i agree i couldn t agree more the rest of the session was again live coding replaying a demo which uses the techniques described in a couple of blog posts to whittle a docker container down from a base size of 700mb to a scratch size 7mb all in all a great day the split level venue suited the three track conference well the speakers delivered terrific sessions which the audiences engaged with i d like to thank the organisers sponsors speakers and other attendees perec igniteswansea 3 2018 02 03 self perec talks oulipo comments at ignite swansea 3 i spoke about georges perec s masterpiece life a user s manual perec was and indeed still is a member of oulipo a parisian literary group interested in exploring the effects of applying mathematical patterns to text his work seemed an appropriate subject for a presentation constrained to fit the ignite formula 20 slides 15 seconds 5 minutes it s material i ve spoken about before but the slides are new the talk was recorded i enjoyed attempting just a minute 5 though on the night i could have sworn i was subject to a cruel powerpoint bug which sped up the playback oulipo fans migh...