Metaprogramming and other topics
Todays post is all about one of the tools to speed up your Python code. Cython can be installed with pip: pip install cython What the heck is Cython anyway? From one point of view, Cython is a language that is very close to a superset of Python syntax. That is to say, most Python…
Today I’m going to talk about python metaclasses. Metaclasses are generally considered to be an advanced python topic, but I promise that it’s really not that bad. The first step on the path to understanding metaclasses is to recognize that in python, even though you don’t need to specify types (as you do in many…
Let’s talk about the yield keyword in python. yield? So what is yield all about? Let’s fire up an IPython Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop (REPL) and dive right in with an example: In [1]: def yielder(): …: i = 5 …: while i > 0: …: yield i …: i -= 1 So what happens when we call…
When I was starting out with Python I introduced a bug into my code because I didn’t understand how scoping works in closures. This is a pretty common pitfall, so here is a post exploring the mistake and how to avoid it. Check out this code: import threading def threaded_print(): for i in range(10): def…
Memoization (a key concept in dynamic programming) is a fancy word that basically means storing the results of computation and never recomputing. Instead, you simply look up the already computed value. Any pure function can be memoized. Memoization can have a dramatic affect on the runtime of algorithms which use the results of computation multiple…
In Python, methods or attributes that begin with _ are considered ‘private’. There isn’t public/private/protected levels of access as there are in some other languages, but a single _ is an indication that the method or attribute is not part of the public API. There is further meaning for things that start with two of…
I’ve had the pleasure of talking to several folks who are involved in cybersecurity in one form or another. It’s surprising to me how few of us have actually gone through the trouble of crafting an exploit by hand. I think that the process of identifying a vulnerability and exploiting it by hand leads to…
In some functional languages like haskell, all functions are automatically curried. Consider the following function: f a b c = a + b + c The type inference engine determines that the type is: f :: Num a => a -> a -> a -> a This should be exactly what we expected. It says…