Tag Archives: computer code

Musical Scale Modes Table

01 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Fun, Python

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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.

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Calculating the Number e (in Python)

10 Sunday Sep 2023

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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…

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Loving the Lambda

15 Saturday Jan 2022

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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”…

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Naming Things (redux)

27 Monday Dec 2021

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The first article (long, long ago) about naming things only scratched the surface. Even with company and language guidelines (or other rules) to help, with so many things to name it’s easy to lose control. Even now, after 44 years of writing code, I still sometimes find myself staring at the screen trying to think of what to name some object.

It’s understandable; there are a lot of things to think about when it comes to a name.

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The Synchronization Problem

29 Monday Nov 2021

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One of the great battles programmers fight involves synchronization between two different parts of the code. The most common example of this is what the comments say versus what the code really does. Another common example is the structure of data stored somewhere (like a database) and the code that manipulates it.

A lot of the programmer’s effort and technique is devoted to managing, if not preventing, synchronization issues. The rules encouraging encapsulation, or against global objects, have a lot to do with this goal.

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Abusing #define in C

19 Friday Nov 2021

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When I was a callow young programmer learning the ropes and enjoying the sheer power of the C language, I got a bit carried away with the macro pre-processor’s ability to let you redefine the language.

As much fun as that is, and as much as it can make your source code look cool, it’s a really bad idea. At some point the folks in comp.lang.c read me the riot act about it, and they were right.

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A Simple DL Parser

10 Wednesday Nov 2021

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Last time I introduced a general Definition Language (DL) I created for defining structured information. The end goal was an extension of DL, called Data Definition Language (DDL), intended for defining memory and file formats. It was intended for tools that examine that data, allowing them more knowledgeable output than a raw hex dump.

I mentioned that DL has been on my mind lately, and as it turns out I spent the day yesterday writing a DL parser in Python.

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Always Implement toString

02 Tuesday Nov 2021

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Although I’m categorizing this one as really good advice, rather than as a rule, I think it should be viewed as basically a rule. I think it should be a rule in any object-oriented language that supports it natively (Java and Python, for example).

The advice (rule of thumb, say) is to always create a useful implementation of toString when you create a class. It makes your development and maintenance life ever so much better.

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Playing with Polynomials

01 Monday Nov 2021

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I haven’t put nearly the energy into this blog as I have my main blog, Logos Con Carne. My intentions are good, but I never seem to get around to posting here. (It’s certainly not due to lack of interest.)

In an attempt to get more in the habit, I thought I’d write about some simple fun I had recently with a class for calculating polynomials. It was inspired by a lesson from a set of really fun Python tutorial YouTube videos.

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Tabs or Spaces?

19 Tuesday Oct 2021

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There are many issues that divide programmers: operating systems and editors being two huge ones. I’ve worked on too many platforms to care much about the first one, but I’m a lifelong gvim user.

One of the lesser dividing issues involves the crucial source coding choice: Tabs or Spaces? The issue is both less and more important these days. Less because editors are very capable; more because Python is popular.

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