A post about Haskell vs. Python readability came onto my radar the other day. It compares two implementations of a trie structure, and after looking upon the Python version I wanted to make my own attempt. I didn't make it to necessarily compare or "battle" against the other solutions, it's ...
So what happened was, I fed up manually uploading pictures I export from Darktable to my Flickr photo stream using the browser's file picker. So I decided to do something about it. The initial idea was to craft a FUSE file system which would automatically upload new files, but this ...
There were several moments over the last few weeks when I heard people discuss differences between Python lists and dicts and one of the first ones mentioned was that lists are ordered and dicts are not. Well, not anymore. Quoting the docs referenced above: Changed in version 3.7: Dictionary order ...
Here's a toy problem. Given a corpus of phone numbers for different countries determine a most prevalent display format in each country and use it to re-format an arbitrary phone number for its country. For example, if most US numbers in our data corpus are written like xxx-xxx-xxxx then the ...
Yesterday I released version 2.0 of the streaming JSON parser ijson. It mostly includes bug fixes accumulated over the last year and the only reason to change the major part of the version number was that import ijson doesn't do any discovery magic anymore. Import Previously, when you did import ...
It's been a while since my last update on the python3-openid refactoring. Though I still work on it pretty actively, I totally failed at documenting the process as I planned in the beginning. So I came up with a new plan. New plan First of all, I admit to gravely ...
Carpet bombing is a "large aerial bombing done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land." Similarly, carpet testing is done by progressively tossing random data samples at your code without regard for its internal structure, hoping that sufficient amount of data ...
This is the first installment of my diaries on refactoring python3-openid. The post is turning out pretty big so may be I should try doing them more often. Warm-up I started with fixing failing tests, because you can't do refactoring without tests. The root cause of errors was somewhere inside ...
Apparently, there is no obvious choice for an OpenID library in Python 3. In Python 2 there's python-openid which — despite being an ugly over-engineered mess of a code — works and conforms to the spec. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about its independent port to Python3 python3-openid, which ...
Did you know that memory is slow compared to CPU? I kinda knew too but recently I've got a revelation from two unrelated sources about how it affects design of programming languages. I also learned about a new thing called "value/reference type dichotomy". I've stumbled upon this term while reading ...
To my surprise this blog is still read by people whose profession involves Python. To all of them I'd like to remind that the second Russian PyCon starts in just two weeks and you might want to consider going. There'll be smart and important people abound and, if my experience ...
I value very much the ability to put complex concepts into words in a systematic manner. And I thrive to do the same (at least, I did try when I was blogging actively). So now I'm a big fan of Glyph who laid out everything that is problematic about threads: ...
I've finally scraped some time to finish and release a new version of ijson — 1.0. New stuff: support for YAJL 2 pure Python parser compatibility with Python 2 and Python 3 Parsing improvements On this I have already posted in details not that long ago. To summarize, ijson now ...
It's a funny thing when after neglecting your project for a year you get a question on whether it's orphaned and then suddenly you find yourself hacking on it for few days straight… Knowing that your work is needed and appreciated is the greatest motivator! Anyway… The news I wanted ...
The @decorator syntax in Python is easy to abuse. After all, it's simply a syntactic sugar for: obj = decorator(obj) The obj must be a function or a class but Python doesn't care about the output value that is then assigned to the same name. It may be, quite literally, ...
My problem with virtualenv is solved. Great thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for taking the time to understand it and pushing me into the right direction. As I said in the previous post, I didn't really need the isolation feature of virtualenv with my single-user, single-codebase site. What I really needed ...
Over the course of a few recent weeks I updated this site to a more modern software and revised some previously made choices. This one was loooong overdue considering that I still ran Ubuntu 9.10 before the update meaning that the system was almost 3 years old. Here are some ...
Today I've come upon a very interesting development in the story of optimizing pure Python version of ijson. The thing as I left them yesterday were like this: Original yajl wrapper0.47 sec CPython0.84 sec PyPy1.30 sec These are the times of parsing a JSON array of 10000 objects. The parser ...
I happen to follow Alex Gaynor on Twitter and his ravings on speed and general awesomeness of PyPy have inspired me to a small experiment. I have this iterative JSON parser — ijson — which is a ctypes-based wrapper around C library yajl by Lloyd Hilaiel. I don't know of ...
The usual solution to parsing JSON in Python is using either the included in the standard library simplejson or the third-party cjson that became popular recently. Both libraries process JSON in one piece: parse the whole thing and return a native Python object. However there is a certain value in ...