Ned Batchelder's personal blog.
I ve had an idea rattling around to get more detail from coverage measurement. Can we measure the coverage in a function separately for each caller of the function? Here s why I want it: in Acidica , my toy BASIC interpreter, I had code to implement the built-in functions that looked something like this: match   func_name :      case   "LEN" :…
My latest fun project is a BASIC interpreter called Acidica . Classic BASIC is an old-school language first developed in 1964 that saw an explosion of implementations on microcomputers in the 70s and 80s. It s much more primitive than the Visual Basic that you might be familiar with. A simple BASIC program: 10   INPUT   "What is your name" ;   U$ 20   PRINT…
My mother is 86, and she is declining. Things that used to be easy for her now seem completely foreign. She was a programmer, writing software before I could read, so it is very strange to see her like this. She no longer uses a computer. If I mention some photos I found online, she asks if there s any way she can see them, as if she has never used the internet. This is a new reality for me, but…
I saw this dodecahedron with an Islamic-inspired pattern designed by Taj Ragoo . As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to make one. I studied the pattern, wrote some Python, and made myself a PDF. I cut it out, folded it, glued it together, and now I have one of my own: I love that this elegantly combines two pure geometric forms: the Platonic dodecahedron (12 uniform pentagons), and an Islamic…
Perhaps because 64 is a power of two, and a square and a cube, but also for other reasons, it pops up in lots of places. Here are some of the things I ve associated it with over the years: ¶ Crayola 64-crayon box : as a kid, this box seemed like the ultimate luxury, the Rolls-Royce of crayons. So many colors, and the box had a built-in sharpener. Advanced technology! ¶ A chess board has 64…
There are many historical artifacts and monuments in Boston. This is one of my favorites: It s in the center of the Granary Burying Ground , the third-oldest cemetery in Boston. Casual tourists will assume the monument marks Ben Franklin s grave, but they are wrong: it is for his parents. Ben Franklin wrote an inscription for his parents grave. The marker deteriorated and in 1827 was replaced with…
This is the mascot for Boston Python . It s called Snake Way for Ducklings: My son Ben drew it, which makes me very happy. He also drew Sleepy Snake . Wearing this image on a shirt around PyCon, I had to explain it a number of times. People in Boston understand it almost immediately, but others need more background. In 1941, Robert McCloskey wrote a children s book called Make Way for Ducklings .…
Last week was PyCon US in Long Beach California. As always, it was a jam-packed intense time. I ll try to report on my experience. The videos aren t uploaded yet, but I ll link to them later when they are. This recap is longer than I ve done in the past. I don t know why, it s just how it came out. I want to convey a sense of what I get out of PyCon and what you can get out of PyCon. Thursday…
One of the hard parts of moving from school to the real world is adjusting to all the ways that school is artificial. It s different from the real world. I ve been thinking about this because of questions I see young learners commonly asking. Too often the questions are meaningless in the real world, and even if you could get answers, the answers would use useless. How long does it take to learn…
I wrote a Sphinx extension to eliminate excessive links: linklint . It started as a linter to check and modify .rst files, but it grew into a Sphinx extension that works without changing the source files. It all started with a topic in the discussion forums: Should not underline links , which argued that the underlining was distracting from the text. Of course we did not remove underlines, they…