In the free Webinar I gave yesterday about functional programming, I mentioned that “map,” or its equivalent (e.g., Python’s list comprehensions), is a powerful tool that I use nearly every day. Once you get into the functional mode of thinking, you’re constantly finding ways to turn one collection into another ...
My most recent blog post talked about the use of str.format instead of the % operator for interpolating values into strings. Some people who read the post wondered about their relative speeds. I should first note that my first response to this is: I don’t really care that much. I’m ...
I have been programming in Python for many years. One of the things that I wondered, soon after starting to work in Python, was how you can get Perl-style variable interpolation. After all, Perl (like the Unix shell) supports two types of quotes — single quotes (in which everything is ...
I love developing software. I also love helping people to learn how to develop better. That’s why I have been teaching programming classes for more than a decade, and why I write about programming. There is so much to learn; it’s a rare day on which I don’t learn something ...