Tag Archives: program

Loving the Lambda

15 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by in Python

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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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Life With Class

07 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in Fun, Python

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Last time I showed you the functions necessary for Life — for John Conway’s game of Life, that is. We ended up with a set of functions you can use to generate frames of a Life session.

This time I’ll show you an object-oriented version (a Life class) along with some other tweaks to make things look nicer.

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John Conway’s Life

03 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Fun, Python

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You may have heard that mathematician John Conway died last April. To his everlasting dismay, most people only know him for his “game” of Life (which he considered trivial and inferior to his real mathematical work). Unfortunately for Conway, his Life game is fascinating.

To honor his passing, I whipped up a Python version that I thought I’d share. Python is about the only language I’ve used a lot in which I’ve never implemented Life, so high time I did, right?

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The Software Industry

11 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by in Opinion

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xkcd #2030 by Randall MonroeI cracked up when I saw this recent xkcd cartoon. Randall Munroe rarely fails to deliver, but this one especially caught my eye. It’s painfully on-point and quite dismaying on at least two points:

Firstly, that it should still be this bad given all the time, money, and attention, it has received is reason alone for dismay. Part of the problem here may be that we haven’t admitted how hard software is to get right.

But, secondly, software is central to our lives now — far more than airplanes, and even more likely than elevator rides. You might ride an elevator, at most, a dozen times a day, but software enters your life more times than that.

Especially if you use a mobile computing device!

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