Category: Uncategorized
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Operator overloading in Python; or, how to lose friends and annoy people
Today we’ll do some operator overloading, or change the behavior of some infix operators (+ and *) for our own handmade classes. There are legitimate reasons for doing so: if adding a behavior for + makes sense for your class, you can improve the readability of your code and make your classes easier to use.…
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A Shaky Introduction to the SOLID Principles
Writing technically proficient code on a line-by-line basis is all well and good, but paying attention only to the micro aspect of our code is a recipe for disaster. But oftentimes that’s what we do, especially as beginners. When we’re just starting out, we struggle with learning the tools, jargon and syntax so that we…
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Thing people on the Internet have an opinion about: Python’s loop/else
Before I even tell you about today’s Python tip, I’ll warn you that there are a lot of opinions on the Internet about whether it’s even a good idea to use, so be sure to pick a side and dig in! Anyway, YMMV, and if you’re writing code that needs to be maintained by a…
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A philosophical investigation of data types
Students, even those with minimal computer science training, don’t often have issues with the concept of a data type when learning Python. A string is put inside a string, and an integer holds an integer; so far, so good. But the primitive data types pose few issues for understanding because students are relying on intuitions…
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How to overflow a stack
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: You don’t actually want to overflow a stack. But if, like me, you get most of your knowledge these days from stackoverflow.com, you may have wondered about the provenance of that website’s name. While I can’t tell you why they called it Stack Overflow per se, I…