Last time, I talked about Python’s boolean operators and and or and what can be confusing about them when “truthy” objects get into the mix. If you haven’t already read it, I would highly recommend it. This article is similar, but looks into something just a little different: the ability to string comparison operators. The Confusing Code Just like last ...

This may come as a shock to my regular readers, but even as a Pythonista and Kotlinite, I’m a little jealous of JavaScript. That’s right; I – a JS hater – am jealous of JavaScript. More specifically, I’m jealous of JavaScript’s object literals (also full-featured function literals, but I don’t think I can do anything about that). Yes, in many ...

It’s time that I got a bit more real with you guys. Pretty much ever since I learned Python, I’ve been touting it as a super amazing language. I’ve been doing the same with Kotlin, but this is about Python. Now, this doesn’t mean I’m going to be changing my tune from here on out; after this, I’m not really ...

Back in my delegate decorator article, I mentioned some weaknesses of the delegate pattern as a substitute to inheritance. The decorator solved one of those problems, but the other is still a problem. The problem comes when using something akin to the template pattern.             The Problem For example, if you have this class: class ...

As many of my readers will likely know, my favorite design pattern is the Decorator Pattern, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned what my second favorite pattern is. This is understandable, as I have a difficult enough time picking favorites usually, let alone second favorites. Well, my second favorite is sort of a toss up between the Factory Pattern and ...

Recently, I posted about how you can use composition instead of inheritance, and in that article, I mentioned the Delegate Pattern. As a quick description, the pattern has you inherit from the parent interface (or, in Python, you can just implement the protocol), but all the methods either redirect to calling the method on an injected implementation of interface/protocol, possibly ...

Python descriptors are a fairly powerful mechanic, especially for creating properties. The built-in property descriptor/decorator works very well for defining properties, but they have a small weakness in my eyes: it doesn’t have defaults for simple usage. Yes, not supplying the property class with all methods does have the decent default of not allowing that usage, but I mean that ...

Last week, I talked about currying a little bit, and I’ve been thinking about how one could do in languages that don’t have it built in. It can be done in Java, but the type of even a two-parameter function would be something like Function<Integer, Function<Integer, Integer>>, which is bad enough. Imagine 3- or 4-parameter functions. There’s also the fact ...

When I first started learning python and read about how they do class methods, I was a bit thrown off. To be an object-level method (rather than class-level, like Java static methods), the first parameter needed to be self. Technically, you could name it whatever you wanted, but the first parameter was supposed to be assumed to be an object ...