Bio and Publications

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Tuesday, January 26, 2021

The Awkwardness of Fundamental Definitions

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A pragmatic description of a language (like Python) from axiomatic -- or really axiom-like -- foundations is exasperatingly hard. I don'...
Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Diagrams and UML notation

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When I started in this business I was given a flowcharting template. See  https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/flowchart...
Thursday, December 24, 2020

How to avoid writing a clickbait headline. (Click for details.)

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It's hard to write shameless promotional material. I already wrote the books, isn't that bold enough? It isn't, though.  Packt’s...
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Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Inelegant Python

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See  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-the-smallest-positive-number-missing-from-an-unsorted-array/ This seems to be a popular coding inte...
Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Mind the Gap -- mypy's slight lag behind Python 3.9

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Working on a new book. Fun stuff. It's going to cover Python 3.9.  I'm adding the type hints material. And that means PEP 585 . Whic...
Tuesday, November 3, 2020

"Python doesn’t do tail recursion" -- wait, what?

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Yes, that's what the email said. I was -- well -- shocked. Too shocked to be polite. Content Warning: much snark follows. BLUF: Tail Rec...
Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Python 3.9 Rearranging typing and collections.abc

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This is glorious. There was this sort of awkward shoving match between typing and collections.abc . Both had generic type definitions and i...