17 Monday Nov 2025
Posted in Interesting, Python
The last two weeks I’ve been on a serious coding binge teaching myself Python’s Tk module. Once I wrap things up, I plan to publish a series of tutorial posts.
In the meantime, here’s a trick I learned recently that allows one to start with a series of data point and use those to (quickly!) generate a set of corresponding data points that are the derivative of the function implied in the first set. The trick uses something called the dual numbers.
21 Monday Jul 2025
Simple Tricks #10 was about Python classes with a focus on the __new__ and __init__ built-in methods plus how to use them when extending Python’s built-in list, tuple, and dict classes.
In this edition of Simple Tricks, we’ll look at a number of possibly actually useful subclasses of Python’s dict class. Specifically, a “ticket” class, a “list of files” class, and an INI file class.
25 Monday Nov 2024
The last two Simple Tricks posts looked at subclasses of built-in Python classes, in particular the tuple class, as well as the built-in class methods Python supports for any user-defined class. [See Simple Tricks #10 and Simple Tricks #11.]
This time I narrow the focus to real and virtual object attributes, the “x”, “y”, “z” elements of our vector objects. Python offers many ways to implement these, depending (as always) on what you want.
11 Monday Nov 2024
Posted in Python
Last time we looked at subclassing the Python built-in classes tuple, list, and dict with a focus on the built-in __new__ and __init__ methods (and never forget to include __str__ and/or __repr__ in your user-defined classes).
This time Simple Tricks explores many of the other built-in methods that help you create richly featured Python-aware objects. Specifically, we’ll focus on subclassing tuple to create (immutable) vector objects. A basic understanding of object-oriented programming is assumed.
28 Monday Oct 2024
Posted in Python
Last time, Simple Tricks looked at some built-in Python functions. This time, we look at three built-in Python container classes, tuple, list, and dict, with a focus on designing useful sub-classes based on them.
We’ll explore the built-in __new__ and __init__ methods in detail along with some of the other built-in methods that help you to create rich new types. [The reader is assumed to be familiar with the basics of object-oriented programming.]
The Hard-Core Coder 