Python | Wisdom and Wonder

With over 100 Git working copies, I wanted something to let me know what I had forgotten to commit or push. This is a basic approach.

The APIs are so powerful, finding the simple approach took time.

Installing Python.h for Pip Installs

Trying to install GitPython and got the error

fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory

And found the solution ~~here~~ here:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-dev

The Best Article on Python Decorators

Here it is.

Finding Python’s package directories

Finding Python’s package directories:

python -c 'import sys, pprint; pprint.pprint(sys.path)'

(via djangobook)

How one class brought SICP back at MIT

Zombie-like, 6.001 rises from the dead to threaten students again. Unlike a zombie, though, it’s moving quite a bit faster than it did the first time. Like the original, don’t walk into the class expecting that it will teach you Scheme; instead, it attempts to teach thought patterns for computer science, and the structure and interpretation of computer programs. Three projects will be assigned and graded. Prereq: some programming experience; high confusion threshold.

(via MIT via keegan via planethaskell)

VIM as Python IDE

Here is a nice article about using VIM as a Python IDE.

(via reddit)

Python and Django look interesting in how they empower you to work with the web. I was reading some interesting points about both here (the one interesting part about Python is that you might not need to know it in order to appreciate Django).

Python’s Functional History

Here is a post of the history of some functional features in Python. It is not exhaustive, but it is interesting to hear the author’s take on things.

(via reddit)

Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python

Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme — it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that’s all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.

But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.

So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered — you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc — you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses.

And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all.

(via wingolog)

Tag: Python

Excellent introduction to Python’s Pip

Watching for uncommitted and unpushed changes in Git