18 Saturday Nov 2023
Posted in Python
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While I love coding, it turns out I don’t enjoy blogging about it quite as much as I thought I would. But I’m not ready to toss in the towel yet, and to help develop more of a habit of posting here, I thought I’d try posting some really simple things.
These are simple tricks intended to help beginners dig deeper into coding with Python.
18 Wednesday Oct 2023
Posted in Python
Python has the useful notion of descriptor objects, which give object attributes control over how they are accessed. Descriptors enable calculated-on-the-fly attribute values and can prevent or control modification of data values.
The previous post covered the basics. In this post, I’ll dig deeper into Python descriptors with some more involved examples. This post assumes the basics covered in the previous post.
17 Tuesday Oct 2023
Posted in Python
Python has the useful notion of descriptor objects as well as the built-in property() function to make using them in the most common cases — read-only and calculated instance attributes — quite easy.
In this post I’ll explore Python descriptors with lots of examples demonstrating how to use them. Descriptors are an important aspect in understanding Python and using it effectively.
01 Sunday Oct 2023
Mathematician and educator John Baez has an excellent series of blog posts about music theory. The seventh concerns generating scales by using notes separated by fifths. Shifting the start point generates the seven major scale modes. Shifting the root key generates those seven modes in the twelve keys (a total of 7×12=84 scales).
John asked if any of his readers would be interested in creating that table of all 84 rows. It sounded like — and turned out to be — a fun exercise. This post explores in detail the Python solution I came up with.
10 Sunday Sep 2023
It has been almost a year since my last post here. I haven’t been idle code-wise, but I have been too distracted by Real Life to do any blogging here. My publication rate is way down on my main blog, too.
To get me posting here more, I think I need more of a focus on casually documenting my own little projects rather than Code Wise articles. Those take more work than I seem willing to put in these days. With that in mind, I have some trivial Python fun to share…
13 Thursday Oct 2022
Posted in Python
Python str instances have many useful methods. I use strip, split, startswith, and others, quite a lot, for instance. One method I haven’t had reason to use so far is translate. It takes a dictionary argument and uses it to map the existing string to a new string.
It’s flexible and useful, so it’s worth knowing how to use.
15 Saturday Jan 2022
Posted in Python
One part of Python I especially appreciate is lambda functions. While I’ve never pursued functional programming, I do like many things about it, particularly the notion of functions as native data objects. Programming with functional objects opens new vistas. Most languages handle it one way or another, but languages make it natural.
Python’s lambda is such a facility, and I use it often. This week I finally got around to writing a lambda function I’ve been meaning to for a long time, and it’s my new favorite. I thought I’d share it along with some of my other “one-liners”…
21 Tuesday Dec 2021
Posted in Python
I’ve been playing with calculating the entropy of a toy system used to illustrate the connection between “disorder” and entropy. (See Entropy 101 and Entropy 102.) I needed to calculate the minimum number of moves required to sort a disordered collection, but that turns out to be an NP problem (no doubt related to Traveling Salesman).
The illustration bridges Boltzmann and Shannon entropy, which got me playing around with the latter, and that led to some practical results. This article describes the code I used mainly as an excuse to try embedding my own colorized source code blocks.
10 Friday Dec 2021
I’m not sure how I got to thinking about Turing Machines (TMs). I was going through some files recently and spent some time looking at busy-beaver.c (from 2017 according to the file date). It contains an implementation of a TM. But something else got me speculating about my own implementation; I just don’t recall what.
I decided to actually write it when it occurred to me that I could use a Python generator to implement the Turing Machine tape. Sadly, I didn’t think of it in time for the trilogy I just published about Python generators (part 1, part 2, part 3).
03 Friday Dec 2021
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Recently I thought to myself, “Hey self… Although I’ve never looked into them, I know Python has tools for parsing Python code. I wonder if they might make generating syntax-highlighted HTML pages of Python scripts pretty easy?”
I found the help page for the tokenize module, and the introduction says it’s “useful for implementing ‘pretty-printers,’ including colorizers for on-screen displays.” That sounds like a strong yes.
The Hard-Core Coder 