WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.620 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. 00:00:04.620 --> 00:00:11.160 This is episode 242, reported July 14th, 2021. I'm Michael Kennedy. 00:00:11.160 --> 00:00:12.180 And I'm Brian Okken. 00:00:12.180 --> 00:00:13.500 Hi, and I'm Al Swigert. 00:00:13.500 --> 00:00:23.400 Hey, Al. Welcome, welcome. Before we get to introduction with you, I just want to say this is brought to you by our courses over at Talk Python Training and Brian's book. 00:00:23.400 --> 00:00:27.720 But first, let's just hear about you, Al. Tell people who you are if they don't know. 00:00:27.720 --> 00:00:36.660 Hey, I'm Al Swigert. I'm mostly known as the author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and a bunch of other Python and programming books for beginners. 00:00:36.660 --> 00:00:42.440 So all my books are released under a Creative Commons license, so it's free to download and share them. 00:00:42.440 --> 00:00:45.200 You can get them at inventwithpython.com. 00:00:45.200 --> 00:00:45.520 Nice. 00:00:45.520 --> 00:00:50.900 Yeah, yeah, fantastic. I would say the Automate the Boring Stuff has certainly been well received. 00:00:50.900 --> 00:00:51.900 Yeah. 00:00:51.900 --> 00:00:54.200 I hear it quoted a lot, for sure. 00:00:54.200 --> 00:00:55.880 Brian, do you want to get us started or what? 00:00:55.880 --> 00:00:57.560 Yeah, I'll just get us started. 00:00:57.560 --> 00:01:08.860 So, no, so Just, I saw a tweet by Jeff Triplett that mentioned Just as a replacement for Make, so I needed to check it out. 00:01:08.860 --> 00:01:10.540 So, and it's like super cool. 00:01:10.540 --> 00:01:16.540 Make, for people who don't know, is a thing that you can type, basically you type Make, and then it automates a bunch of commands. 00:01:16.540 --> 00:01:23.320 Like if you've got a seriously complicated build link process, it could be embedded into a Make file, and then you just type Make, and that happens, right? 00:01:23.320 --> 00:01:24.120 Right, right. 00:01:24.120 --> 00:01:28.980 And it's, I don't know what the history of Make really is, but I used it a long time. 00:01:28.980 --> 00:01:44.500 I've been using it for decades for, one of the things it does well is convert, like if you've got, take all your .c files and convert them to .o files, and then combine your .o files, and all the build process for the C tool chain. 00:01:44.500 --> 00:01:47.340 But you can do it for, you can really do it with any language. 00:01:47.340 --> 00:01:49.820 But people have like abused it, and so have I. 00:01:49.820 --> 00:01:57.200 Even Python projects often use Make files, because Make is often around on Unix-like environments. 00:01:57.200 --> 00:02:04.580 And so having Make file around, you can use it just sort of to automate some of your common tasks, like make release or something. 00:02:04.840 --> 00:02:10.480 To push your, to do all the commands you need to do to do a new release of a project or something. 00:02:10.480 --> 00:02:12.180 But there's problems with it. 00:02:12.180 --> 00:02:15.960 And so Just is a replacement for it. 00:02:15.960 --> 00:02:21.860 And it's written in Rust, so it's pretty fast and clean. 00:02:21.860 --> 00:02:23.880 Well, actually, I don't know if it's clean. 00:02:23.880 --> 00:02:24.980 I haven't looked at the source code. 00:02:24.980 --> 00:02:27.120 But it's really easy to use. 00:02:27.120 --> 00:02:28.920 It's not C, it's got to be better. 00:02:29.260 --> 00:02:31.440 It kind of looks like mail files. 00:02:31.440 --> 00:02:32.480 So, yeah. 00:02:32.480 --> 00:02:37.040 I went ahead and installed it both on a Mac and Windows today to try it out. 00:02:37.040 --> 00:02:44.020 One of the things I really love about it is, it's not, the main part of it is to try to automate commands. 00:02:44.020 --> 00:02:54.200 It's not about, you can build like, you can use it to build things and have recipes to make all your .c files into .o files if you want. 00:02:54.200 --> 00:02:58.860 But the real power is to use it in the way we've been abusing Make before. 00:02:58.860 --> 00:03:01.340 Because you can do some cool things. 00:03:01.340 --> 00:03:13.020 Like, one of the problems with Make always has been the rules have to be on the, or the recipes have to be defined on the left column, leftmost column. 00:03:13.020 --> 00:03:17.320 And then you have to like have a tab for the commands. 00:03:17.460 --> 00:03:24.960 Well, I mean, often I have my editor set up except for Make files to replace tabs with spaces. 00:03:24.960 --> 00:03:28.120 Just works just fine with spaces. 00:03:28.120 --> 00:03:29.240 I love that. 00:03:29.240 --> 00:03:35.140 And also you can pass commands, pass arguments to commands, command lines, stuff like that. 00:03:35.140 --> 00:03:36.300 That's cool. 00:03:36.640 --> 00:03:37.320 It's super cool. 00:03:37.320 --> 00:03:42.500 One of the neat things, I don't know where it is in the documentation here. 00:03:42.500 --> 00:03:44.760 Oh, you can use arbitrary languages. 00:03:44.760 --> 00:03:49.700 You can even do like a Python command within the Just file. 00:03:49.700 --> 00:03:51.060 So it's a... 00:03:51.060 --> 00:03:51.340 That's cool. 00:03:51.340 --> 00:03:53.440 You can do some neat things. 00:03:53.440 --> 00:03:54.340 Or parole or whatever. 00:03:54.340 --> 00:03:57.760 For people listening, you basically declare the languages you want to use. 00:03:57.760 --> 00:04:04.060 And then you can implement code, like print or console.log for JavaScript or whatever. 00:04:04.060 --> 00:04:04.700 Right. 00:04:04.700 --> 00:04:10.800 This actually seems like a bad example because it's actually listing the recipe name as the language name. 00:04:10.800 --> 00:04:11.820 And you don't have to do that. 00:04:11.820 --> 00:04:14.020 So this Python here could just be foo or something. 00:04:14.020 --> 00:04:15.000 Oh, I see. 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:17.940 So the thing that's important is the shebang. 00:04:18.360 --> 00:04:18.560 Yep. 00:04:18.560 --> 00:04:23.660 The shebang tells just which language to use. 00:04:23.660 --> 00:04:25.040 So this is pretty neat. 00:04:25.040 --> 00:04:26.980 I've started using it right away. 00:04:26.980 --> 00:04:28.860 And I think I'm going to keep using it. 00:04:28.860 --> 00:04:29.360 It's great. 00:04:29.360 --> 00:04:31.620 Well, one thing that I got out of this that's interesting. 00:04:31.620 --> 00:04:33.840 Scroll down to where it has like the how to get it. 00:04:33.840 --> 00:04:35.540 You'll see like a whole bunch of links. 00:04:35.540 --> 00:04:37.040 If you go down that page. 00:04:37.040 --> 00:04:38.180 A little more. 00:04:38.180 --> 00:04:38.780 Keep going. 00:04:38.780 --> 00:04:39.580 Installation. 00:04:39.580 --> 00:04:40.940 Yeah, I think so. 00:04:40.940 --> 00:04:41.880 There's a section. 00:04:41.880 --> 00:04:42.380 Oh, no. 00:04:42.380 --> 00:04:42.800 Oh, yeah. 00:04:42.800 --> 00:04:43.100 There you go. 00:04:43.100 --> 00:04:44.320 There's a bunch of... 00:04:44.320 --> 00:04:47.340 It shows you all these different package managers that'll give it to you. 00:04:47.380 --> 00:04:49.500 So if you want to get it from Rust, you can use Cargo. 00:04:49.500 --> 00:04:51.800 On a macOS, there's Homebrew and Mac ports. 00:04:51.800 --> 00:04:56.560 If you want it on Windows, they interestingly recommend Scoop, which I've never used. 00:04:56.560 --> 00:04:57.640 I've only used Proclity. 00:04:57.640 --> 00:04:59.000 So I don't know. 00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:02.420 I feel like there's like ice cream themes or something for the Windows world. 00:05:02.420 --> 00:05:03.960 But yeah, those are pretty interesting. 00:05:03.960 --> 00:05:08.200 I was going to be snarky and say, do you require Make to install Just? 00:05:08.200 --> 00:05:10.700 Yeah. 00:05:10.700 --> 00:05:17.360 So I got no problem using Brew install for on my Mac, but I'm not going to install Scoop. 00:05:17.360 --> 00:05:18.020 for Windows. 00:05:18.020 --> 00:05:20.600 I don't have any other need for it. 00:05:20.600 --> 00:05:22.580 So there is prebuilt binary. 00:05:22.580 --> 00:05:25.080 So I just used the prebuilt binary for Windows. 00:05:25.080 --> 00:05:26.060 It worked fine. 00:05:26.060 --> 00:05:32.460 Yeah, this looks really great because my experience with Make has been to just run the basic make 00:05:32.460 --> 00:05:33.520 command to build something. 00:05:33.520 --> 00:05:35.020 And if it works, that's great. 00:05:35.120 --> 00:05:45.560 And if it doesn't, I have no idea what to do because I feel like my knowledge of Make is sort of like my knowledge of CSS, where it's just been built up from little bits of knowledge over the years. 00:05:45.560 --> 00:05:49.660 And I've never formally sat down and read through all the documentation. 00:05:49.660 --> 00:05:54.240 100% JIT learning, like just enough time that you needed. 00:05:54.240 --> 00:05:55.720 Yeah, exactly. 00:05:56.280 --> 00:05:56.540 Yeah. 00:05:56.540 --> 00:06:00.940 Like, I actually have never really understood why phony targets were needed. 00:06:01.620 --> 00:06:12.720 And this discussion in the readme of this, of Just actually talks about why phony is needed in the first place for make files and why you don't need them for Just. 00:06:12.720 --> 00:06:14.480 So it's kind of interesting. 00:06:14.900 --> 00:06:15.780 Yeah, very cool. 00:06:15.780 --> 00:06:16.260 Very cool. 00:06:16.260 --> 00:06:18.340 We'll move on to the next item. 00:06:18.340 --> 00:06:20.800 A couple of comments for Al out there. 00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:21.100 Teddy. 00:06:21.100 --> 00:06:23.980 Hey, Teddy in the live stream says, love to automate the boring stuff. 00:06:23.980 --> 00:06:25.500 How we learn Python. 00:06:25.500 --> 00:06:28.500 Dean says, always recommend it to get started. 00:06:28.500 --> 00:06:29.120 Great fan. 00:06:29.120 --> 00:06:30.360 So, yeah, that's pretty cool. 00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:30.940 Awesome. 00:06:30.940 --> 00:06:31.560 Hey, thanks. 00:06:31.560 --> 00:06:33.520 I always love hearing that. 00:06:33.520 --> 00:06:34.820 You bet. 00:06:34.820 --> 00:06:35.380 All right. 00:06:35.380 --> 00:06:38.720 I love to hear from our fans of the show. 00:06:38.980 --> 00:06:51.320 And so Roman Wright, who worked on Beanie, the, I believe, Pydantic-based model query for ODM for MongoDB, recommended something else. 00:06:51.320 --> 00:06:55.240 This time we already covered Beanie, something called strong typing. 00:06:55.240 --> 00:06:57.500 So this is a decorator. 00:06:57.500 --> 00:06:58.780 This is from Felix the Sea. 00:06:58.780 --> 00:07:03.320 It's a decorator which checks whether a function is called with the correct arguments. 00:07:03.820 --> 00:07:09.020 So if somebody goes and puts type annotations on their code, that's cool. 00:07:09.020 --> 00:07:14.380 The editors like PyCharm will say, you're doing it wrong when you're doing it wrong. 00:07:14.380 --> 00:07:17.680 Or they'll give you autocomplete and information on the arguments and so on. 00:07:17.680 --> 00:07:20.560 But, you know, Python, that's like a hint, right? 00:07:20.560 --> 00:07:22.480 Called type hints often. 00:07:22.480 --> 00:07:23.640 Because it's a hint. 00:07:23.640 --> 00:07:24.900 It is not a requirement. 00:07:24.900 --> 00:07:32.120 And so if you want to make sure that certain types match up, basically, you can use this decorator. 00:07:32.440 --> 00:07:33.980 And there's not a lot to this one. 00:07:33.980 --> 00:07:36.180 But go over to the read the docs. 00:07:36.180 --> 00:07:39.180 There's a stay strong little character there. 00:07:39.180 --> 00:07:45.820 But the idea is if you had this thing that was like a multiplier, took an a int and a b int, you could pass other stuff. 00:07:45.820 --> 00:07:57.500 But if you pass, like if you could pass like three and four to multiply, but if you pass like hello world, it's just going to try string times string, which there's probably a cool Watt outcome that we could get there. 00:07:57.500 --> 00:07:59.420 But that's not what happens in Python. 00:07:59.420 --> 00:08:00.820 We get a type error, right? 00:08:01.060 --> 00:08:05.420 If you do a string times a number, you get a pretty interesting outcome. 00:08:05.420 --> 00:08:06.680 And this is something of a Watt. 00:08:06.680 --> 00:08:12.100 If you do like hello times four, you get hello, hello, hello, hello four times, which has always been weird. 00:08:12.100 --> 00:08:14.560 When I learned you can multiply strings, it kind of freaked me out. 00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:15.820 But I've come to find it useful. 00:08:15.820 --> 00:08:17.240 So what do people do? 00:08:17.240 --> 00:08:19.260 Well, they're like, well, this won't stand. 00:08:19.260 --> 00:08:20.580 We need to check the type. 00:08:20.800 --> 00:08:27.280 So we're going to say if is instance the first parameter and an int and is instance the second one. 00:08:27.280 --> 00:08:27.820 We can do it. 00:08:27.820 --> 00:08:29.140 Otherwise, we're going to report an error. 00:08:29.140 --> 00:08:29.920 Don't do that. 00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:35.120 Instead, what you can do is you can use this match typing decorator. 00:08:35.160 --> 00:08:41.220 And you can just say at match typing and it's going to take the arguments based on the type 00:08:41.220 --> 00:08:42.560 hints and validate them. 00:08:42.560 --> 00:08:44.300 So if you pass in the right one, great. 00:08:44.300 --> 00:08:45.200 It'll give you an answer. 00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:51.440 If you pass in something that does not match the type annotations described, it'll say it'll 00:08:51.440 --> 00:08:53.300 raise a type mismatch exception. 00:08:53.700 --> 00:08:54.980 And this can be nested down. 00:08:54.980 --> 00:09:01.860 So for example, one of the examples is it takes a list and let's see, takes a list, which 00:09:01.860 --> 00:09:04.460 is a union of strings, ints, and tuples. 00:09:04.460 --> 00:09:11.180 So if you give it a list that has either a string, int, or a tuple mixed heterogeneously 00:09:11.180 --> 00:09:13.140 into the arguments, it'll take that just fine. 00:09:13.140 --> 00:09:17.820 But if you give it some other type, like a list that happens to contain one of the elements 00:09:17.820 --> 00:09:19.520 as a date time, it'll give you this exception. 00:09:19.520 --> 00:09:21.680 So it's not just, oh, it took a list. 00:09:21.680 --> 00:09:27.100 It has, you know, like the transitive sort of property of analyzing the types is validated 00:09:27.100 --> 00:09:27.360 there. 00:09:27.360 --> 00:09:28.520 So pretty interesting. 00:09:28.520 --> 00:09:29.060 What do you two think? 00:09:29.060 --> 00:09:29.560 Yeah. 00:09:29.560 --> 00:09:34.940 So the difference between this and something like mypy is that this operates at runtime, 00:09:34.940 --> 00:09:35.420 right? 00:09:35.420 --> 00:09:36.020 Right. 00:09:36.020 --> 00:09:36.460 Exactly. 00:09:36.460 --> 00:09:38.420 Because you could do all the mypy stuff you want. 00:09:38.420 --> 00:09:41.880 And if people don't run it, well, you're not going to get any information out of it, 00:09:41.880 --> 00:09:42.080 right? 00:09:42.080 --> 00:09:42.400 Yeah. 00:09:42.400 --> 00:09:45.740 That was something that I was really surprised to learn when I first learned type hinting was 00:09:45.740 --> 00:09:51.580 that really Python's type hints don't really affect the runtime code. 00:09:51.580 --> 00:09:52.380 at all. 00:09:52.380 --> 00:09:55.880 It's just set up for static source code checkers like mypy. 00:09:55.880 --> 00:10:01.020 So it doesn't turn Python magically into a statically typed language. 00:10:01.020 --> 00:10:04.560 It's just for these static source tools. 00:10:04.560 --> 00:10:05.540 Yeah, exactly. 00:10:05.540 --> 00:10:06.660 That's mypy is. 00:10:06.660 --> 00:10:09.280 And this is kind of the other side of that, right? 00:10:09.280 --> 00:10:11.160 This is the runtime one. 00:10:11.160 --> 00:10:15.680 So maybe you would use this in the case where you're building a package or library and it's 00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:20.240 you've done everything correctly, but someone else is consuming it potentially incorrectly 00:10:20.240 --> 00:10:24.060 and you can't control whether the world uses mypy or not, right? 00:10:24.060 --> 00:10:24.280 Yeah. 00:10:24.280 --> 00:10:25.440 You just wrote a library. 00:10:25.620 --> 00:10:30.420 And so you could use this on say the boundary of your library, not everywhere, just on the 00:10:30.420 --> 00:10:33.560 boundary to make sure the stuff that goes in and out is valid. 00:10:33.560 --> 00:10:37.240 And this would be really helpful for stuff that I work on because usually I'm just sort 00:10:37.240 --> 00:10:40.920 of writing code ad hoc that sort of does this runtime checking. 00:10:40.920 --> 00:10:46.360 But it's really nice that I could just throw in a function decorator and just add that capability 00:10:46.360 --> 00:10:48.500 and that's all I have to do. 00:10:48.500 --> 00:10:49.460 Yeah, absolutely. 00:10:49.460 --> 00:10:50.140 Oh man, yeah. 00:10:50.140 --> 00:10:51.360 Yeah, this is great. 00:10:51.360 --> 00:10:55.380 Well, so clearly this is adding code, your code, right? 00:10:55.380 --> 00:10:58.620 So I'm just curious about the performance. 00:10:58.620 --> 00:10:59.220 Yeah. 00:10:59.220 --> 00:10:59.820 So is Teddy. 00:10:59.820 --> 00:11:03.740 He out there in the live stream asked, do you know if there's any potential lost performance 00:11:03.740 --> 00:11:04.820 since it's running at runtime? 00:11:04.820 --> 00:11:09.000 I'm going to say I am certain there is lost performance. 00:11:09.000 --> 00:11:15.260 Unfortunately, in Python, calling a function is a relatively slow operation. 00:11:15.820 --> 00:11:18.580 And doing a decorator is effectively calling a function. 00:11:18.580 --> 00:11:19.800 So it's got to be slower. 00:11:19.800 --> 00:11:24.060 That's why I would say put it just on the boundaries, you know, something like that. 00:11:24.060 --> 00:11:28.060 But I mean, the alternative is if you actually want to do these tests, if you actually want 00:11:28.060 --> 00:11:34.380 to do that validation, it's an if statement and multiple is instance of all over the plate, 00:11:34.380 --> 00:11:34.560 right? 00:11:34.560 --> 00:11:37.240 So if you're going to do that validation anyway, you're already calling. 00:11:37.240 --> 00:11:38.340 It's just not on the outside. 00:11:38.340 --> 00:11:39.620 It's on the inside, right? 00:11:39.620 --> 00:11:41.200 So good question. 00:11:41.200 --> 00:11:41.680 I don't know. 00:11:41.680 --> 00:11:42.460 Yeah. 00:11:42.460 --> 00:11:44.760 Another question from Ben Lindsay. 00:11:44.900 --> 00:11:48.300 Do you know how this compares with Pydantic's validate arguments decorator? 00:11:48.300 --> 00:11:53.400 I don't know, but I'm a big fan of Pydantic and the validate arguments decorator is exactly 00:11:53.400 --> 00:11:56.240 the same type of thing that we're talking about. 00:11:56.240 --> 00:11:59.580 So for example, like you should put the at validate arguments. 00:11:59.720 --> 00:12:03.880 The thing is that I did notice somewhere that, yeah, here it is. 00:12:03.880 --> 00:12:07.500 Like this validate arguments decorator is in beta for whatever that means. 00:12:07.500 --> 00:12:11.080 It won't be concrete until V2 Pydantic. 00:12:11.080 --> 00:12:18.260 But that may well be more, more concrete and more formalized than this one. 00:12:18.260 --> 00:12:18.500 Right. 00:12:18.500 --> 00:12:20.440 Although this is more standalone, right? 00:12:20.440 --> 00:12:21.480 You don't necessarily. 00:12:22.060 --> 00:12:24.700 It feels like a little tiny thing that you just plug in on there. 00:12:24.700 --> 00:12:26.040 Pydantic is doing a lot. 00:12:26.040 --> 00:12:27.300 I'm a fan of Pydantic. 00:12:27.300 --> 00:12:28.080 So yeah. 00:12:28.080 --> 00:12:28.960 Good question, Ben. 00:12:28.960 --> 00:12:29.680 All right. 00:12:29.680 --> 00:12:30.940 Al, you got the next one, right? 00:12:30.940 --> 00:12:31.900 Yeah. 00:12:31.900 --> 00:12:34.640 So I have a new book out. 00:12:34.640 --> 00:12:36.560 It just came out at the end of June. 00:12:36.560 --> 00:12:39.800 It's called The Big Book of Small Python Projects. 00:12:39.920 --> 00:12:46.320 So a lot of my books have been for people who are total beginners or relatively new to not 00:12:46.320 --> 00:12:48.400 just Python, but to programming in general. 00:12:48.400 --> 00:12:50.260 Generally people who have boring stuff. 00:12:50.260 --> 00:12:50.920 Yes. 00:12:50.920 --> 00:12:51.700 Yes. 00:12:51.700 --> 00:12:53.080 Oh, man. 00:12:53.080 --> 00:12:54.600 So much boring stuff. 00:12:54.600 --> 00:12:58.100 Actually, you have books on games and things as well. 00:12:58.100 --> 00:12:58.620 Yeah. 00:12:58.620 --> 00:12:58.980 Yeah. 00:12:58.980 --> 00:13:04.340 That's the two approaches I have to tricking people into learning how to program is getting 00:13:04.340 --> 00:13:07.600 away from Excel and then also learning how to make video games. 00:13:08.600 --> 00:13:11.580 Seems to be really common pathways into programming. 00:13:11.580 --> 00:13:17.380 So I've also noticed that with a lot of beginner tutorials, people learn the syntax and they 00:13:17.380 --> 00:13:20.400 learn all the concepts like loops and variables and things like that. 00:13:20.400 --> 00:13:25.420 But when it comes to actually working on their own projects, they're sort of stuck and they're 00:13:25.420 --> 00:13:30.520 just left staring at a blank editor and not really knowing how to proceed from there. 00:13:30.520 --> 00:13:35.840 And a lot of people will give them usually the two bits of advice that people get are, oh, 00:13:35.840 --> 00:13:40.020 you should work on open source projects or just read the code for open source projects, 00:13:40.020 --> 00:13:45.200 which is actually pretty terrible advice for beginners because a lot of open source projects 00:13:45.200 --> 00:13:46.800 might not be well documented. 00:13:46.800 --> 00:13:50.000 They're written for professional software engineers. 00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:52.400 There's a lot of concepts. 00:13:52.440 --> 00:13:52.520 Yeah. 00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:56.960 There's a huge difference between something that is absolutely polished and meant to be 00:13:56.960 --> 00:13:59.120 used in many situations in the real world. 00:13:59.120 --> 00:14:03.560 Like you might learn a lot by looking at Django, but most of the time you'll probably just be 00:14:03.560 --> 00:14:03.960 confused. 00:14:03.960 --> 00:14:05.320 You're like, why is this so complicated? 00:14:05.320 --> 00:14:10.600 Well, it's so complicated because, you know, a million websites use it in weird ways and that's 00:14:10.600 --> 00:14:11.280 why it's complicated. 00:14:11.280 --> 00:14:13.280 That's not a good learning tool per se. 00:14:13.680 --> 00:14:13.840 Yeah. 00:14:13.840 --> 00:14:18.040 Especially for someone who just learned about, you know, how to call functions and how to create 00:14:18.040 --> 00:14:20.000 classes and pretty basic things like that. 00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:26.980 So I spent, I think, I think I was working on this on and off again for about two or three years, 00:14:26.980 --> 00:14:32.780 but I wanted to create a collection of small little programs, mostly like games or puzzles 00:14:32.780 --> 00:14:38.920 or little simulations or things like that, where they were all just really simple and easy for 00:14:38.920 --> 00:14:43.000 beginners to read through and then they can understand, oh, this is how all of these concepts 00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:46.600 I learned get applied to an actual program that does something. 00:14:46.600 --> 00:14:48.000 So these aren't code snippets. 00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:50.740 They're not just like tiny little functions or things like this. 00:14:50.740 --> 00:14:56.860 This is programs that you can actually copy the code yourself and then figure out how they 00:14:56.860 --> 00:14:57.180 work. 00:14:57.180 --> 00:15:00.640 So I have about 81 of these projects altogether. 00:15:00.640 --> 00:15:08.600 They're all under, I set a limit of 256 lines of code, just as an arbitrary power of eight to 00:15:08.600 --> 00:15:09.120 set it to. 00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:11.880 And they are all text-based games. 00:15:11.880 --> 00:15:16.860 So they're fairly old school looking, like a lot of the games that people were programming 00:15:16.860 --> 00:15:19.480 in basic in the 1980s and 90s. 00:15:19.480 --> 00:15:26.140 But the plus side of that is that all of the games are really simple and you don't have to 00:15:26.140 --> 00:15:29.620 install additional libraries or modules or things like that. 00:15:29.620 --> 00:15:36.940 You can pretty much just type the code in and it just uses the Python standard library 00:15:36.940 --> 00:15:38.120 for all of this. 00:15:38.120 --> 00:15:41.540 I have a few of these programs that use a few other modules as well. 00:15:41.540 --> 00:15:46.420 But for the most part, you can get pretty far with just text and just ASCII art. 00:15:46.420 --> 00:15:52.640 And also, even if you already know Python, these programs are great just for ideas of if you 00:15:52.640 --> 00:15:55.860 want to learn another programming language and just get used to how things work in that. 00:15:56.200 --> 00:16:04.680 You could find the idea for a blackjack game from this collection of programs or this birthday paradox 00:16:04.680 --> 00:16:08.580 calculator and all sorts of these little projects right here. 00:16:08.580 --> 00:16:16.260 And of course, this book is also freely available online at inventwithpython.com slash bigbookpython. 00:16:16.260 --> 00:16:20.680 I'm starting to get reviews coming in on Amazon and they seem to be pretty positive. 00:16:20.680 --> 00:16:27.700 So I'm really hopeful about people just being able to take the next step in learning to code with this book. 00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:28.080 Yeah. 00:16:28.080 --> 00:16:28.340 Cool. 00:16:28.340 --> 00:16:28.900 Cool. 00:16:28.900 --> 00:16:29.380 Yeah. 00:16:29.380 --> 00:16:36.360 And then the other book that I had that came out in November is Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python, 00:16:36.360 --> 00:16:40.440 which is sort of the follow-up book to automate the boring stuff with Python. 00:16:40.760 --> 00:16:43.880 I had a lot of people who were asking me like, oh, I really like to automate. 00:16:43.880 --> 00:16:45.740 What should I read next? 00:16:45.740 --> 00:16:52.200 And I had like some things that I would tell them like fluent Python is a really great book, 00:16:52.200 --> 00:16:56.660 but it's also like 800 pages or 800 pounds or something. 00:16:56.660 --> 00:17:02.200 It's a really huge book and the information in it is great, but it's really intimidating to 00:17:02.200 --> 00:17:05.080 take this book and it's like, okay, read this one next. 00:17:05.940 --> 00:17:13.580 So I wanted to cover a book that had sort of the best practices for a lot of like software 00:17:13.580 --> 00:17:14.080 engineers. 00:17:14.080 --> 00:17:19.580 So there's sections on like how to name your variables or how to do code formatting. 00:17:19.580 --> 00:17:22.020 And then I talk about the black code formatting tool. 00:17:22.020 --> 00:17:25.260 I talk about type hints and how to write documentation. 00:17:25.260 --> 00:17:32.980 I have a very superficial coverage of Git and GitHub and how to use version control. 00:17:33.760 --> 00:17:38.220 And just, you know, and I even dive into like, what exactly does Pythonic mean? 00:17:38.220 --> 00:17:45.100 Spoiler alert, Pythonic basically means anything the person you're talking to wants it to mean 00:17:45.100 --> 00:17:45.680 at the time. 00:17:45.680 --> 00:17:50.640 But yeah, just sort of a lot of the things that you don't really get in your typical 00:17:50.640 --> 00:17:51.980 hello world tutorial. 00:17:51.980 --> 00:17:58.500 These are the sort of tidbits that you would pick up with experience over years of experience, 00:17:58.500 --> 00:17:58.900 I guess. 00:17:59.280 --> 00:18:03.540 but I just wanted to collect all of that advice and information and best practices into 00:18:03.540 --> 00:18:04.240 a single book. 00:18:04.240 --> 00:18:08.860 So yeah, that's also available online at the inventwithpython.com website. 00:18:08.860 --> 00:18:09.340 Cool. 00:18:09.340 --> 00:18:11.040 A couple of comments from the live stream. 00:18:11.040 --> 00:18:16.480 John Dehan says, beyond the basic stuff was great for learning to do things Python way. 00:18:16.480 --> 00:18:17.800 And wow. 00:18:17.800 --> 00:18:19.120 Great to see you, Mr. Swigert. 00:18:19.120 --> 00:18:23.300 Seems like only yesterday I was promoting your last book at Bay Piggies from... 00:18:23.300 --> 00:18:24.040 Oh, hey, Neil. 00:18:24.040 --> 00:18:24.720 How's it going? 00:18:24.720 --> 00:18:25.680 Cool. 00:18:26.020 --> 00:18:26.420 Yeah. 00:18:26.420 --> 00:18:26.620 Yeah. 00:18:26.620 --> 00:18:27.100 Very cool. 00:18:27.100 --> 00:18:28.620 Congrats on the books. 00:18:28.620 --> 00:18:30.760 Brian, let's go. 00:18:30.760 --> 00:18:32.740 Let's talk about something completely different than books. 00:18:32.740 --> 00:18:35.260 Like notebooks. 00:18:35.260 --> 00:18:36.720 Yes. 00:18:36.720 --> 00:18:38.720 Let's talk about notebooks. 00:18:38.720 --> 00:18:39.800 Thanks for popping that up. 00:18:39.800 --> 00:18:40.880 Yeah. 00:18:40.880 --> 00:18:43.420 So this was another suggestion. 00:18:43.420 --> 00:18:45.680 This suggestion came from David Nicholson. 00:18:45.680 --> 00:18:46.460 Thanks, David. 00:18:47.020 --> 00:18:51.660 I thought we'd covered this already, but then I looked in, but we haven't. 00:18:51.660 --> 00:18:56.420 And I looked into it and it's, and I obviously haven't played with it yet, but okay. 00:18:56.420 --> 00:18:58.600 So test book is very cool. 00:18:58.600 --> 00:18:59.220 Test book. 00:18:59.220 --> 00:19:02.060 The idea is to test your Jupyter notebooks. 00:19:02.060 --> 00:19:07.440 I think we've covered a couple things, ways to do that, but this is kind of a neat perspective. 00:19:07.440 --> 00:19:16.000 So the perspective of this is you've got a notebook with maybe, let's say, functions in it, and you want to check those. 00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:19.040 You want to make sure that you want to write tests against those functions. 00:19:19.260 --> 00:19:28.540 Instead of putting the tests in your notebook, put them in like just a test file and run it with pytest or UnitTest or something. 00:19:28.540 --> 00:19:38.060 And so to do that, though, like let's say I want to run a function foo and I want to do it from another file. 00:19:38.060 --> 00:19:41.020 I've got to get that definition of foo into my test code. 00:19:41.020 --> 00:19:55.000 And so what test book does is it has a decorator that you can either put it on your test or a fixture that goes ahead and runs the, one of the things you can do is run your notebook before the test runs. 00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:57.140 And then you can pull out the definitions. 00:19:57.140 --> 00:19:57.180 Oh yeah, this is really cool. 00:19:57.180 --> 00:20:02.900 So you have a decorator, which has a path to the IPYNB file and execute equals true. 00:20:03.020 --> 00:20:13.620 And by the time it gets to your code, it's already going to run that, that things defined like a function or variables defined within the notebook will just be accessible through the input parameter there. 00:20:13.620 --> 00:20:14.080 Yep. 00:20:14.080 --> 00:20:16.340 And the test gets a fix. 00:20:16.340 --> 00:20:20.760 You can have a fixture to be able to grab values, references. 00:20:20.760 --> 00:20:31.600 So the example we're showing right now shows pulling a function in, but I imagine you can pull in really anything, any name that exists within the notebook to be able to test it. 00:20:32.780 --> 00:20:39.200 some of the neat things that it includes right off the bat is it's nice that it doesn't, it isn't just by test. 00:20:39.200 --> 00:20:42.900 You can use it with unit test, apparently also with nose, but don't do that. 00:20:42.900 --> 00:20:53.780 one of the ways things you can do also is in the original example of decorating a test, it's going to run that notebook for every, every test it's decorated. 00:20:53.780 --> 00:20:55.500 You might not want that. 00:20:55.500 --> 00:20:56.180 You might. 00:20:56.180 --> 00:21:01.980 but if you want to run it all just once, you can put it in a fixture and then return the fixture. 00:21:01.980 --> 00:21:03.040 That's a cool thing. 00:21:03.040 --> 00:21:12.260 one reason why you might want to run it multiple times is if, if there are interactions between the different parts and you want to completely isolate those tests. 00:21:12.260 --> 00:21:14.640 Another thing that's built into it is patching. 00:21:14.640 --> 00:21:16.560 So you don't have to import mock. 00:21:16.560 --> 00:21:24.820 You can patch different parts of your, your Python code, your Python notebook, your notebook code, with, like, like mock. 00:21:25.040 --> 00:21:27.340 you can patch it right through this. 00:21:27.340 --> 00:21:28.360 So that's pretty neat. 00:21:28.360 --> 00:21:29.300 Yeah, that's pretty neat. 00:21:29.300 --> 00:21:30.120 I like it. 00:21:30.120 --> 00:21:30.880 Al, what do you think? 00:21:30.880 --> 00:21:31.540 Nice. 00:21:31.540 --> 00:21:31.940 Yeah. 00:21:31.940 --> 00:21:41.800 I haven't had a lot of experience with Jupyter notebooks, but it's, it's sort of becoming the main way that a lot of people are being introduced to Python, especially if they're coming from, the sciences or academia. 00:21:42.100 --> 00:21:42.440 Yep. 00:21:42.560 --> 00:21:42.800 Yeah. 00:21:42.800 --> 00:21:51.280 And so getting like sort of a lot of, informally trained software engineers, up to speed with, with like unit testing and other practices like that. 00:21:51.280 --> 00:21:53.180 It's definitely something I can get behind. 00:21:53.180 --> 00:21:53.960 Yeah, that's cool. 00:21:54.000 --> 00:22:00.800 And the, getting the ability to call those pieces or interact with those pieces outside the notebook is quite tricky. 00:22:00.800 --> 00:22:02.780 So this is a neat way to do it. 00:22:02.780 --> 00:22:06.920 I mean, we've got paper mail, but I'm not sure exactly how that folds into testing and stuff like that. 00:22:06.920 --> 00:22:07.120 Right. 00:22:07.120 --> 00:22:07.760 Right. 00:22:07.760 --> 00:22:08.180 Actually. 00:22:08.180 --> 00:22:08.740 Yeah. 00:22:08.740 --> 00:22:09.200 Yeah. 00:22:09.200 --> 00:22:09.820 I don't think so. 00:22:09.820 --> 00:22:13.380 I think it's more like inputs and outputs as a whole notebook. 00:22:13.380 --> 00:22:17.820 Not like, let me get ahold of the function in the cell seven and try to call that. 00:22:17.820 --> 00:22:19.100 Yeah. 00:22:19.100 --> 00:22:21.560 Also, the target audience is different. 00:22:21.560 --> 00:22:27.720 So the target audience for your notebook itself is different than you trying to test your code. 00:22:27.720 --> 00:22:34.500 So, keeping the test code out of the notebook, I think is a nice thing to, to keep it clean. 00:22:34.500 --> 00:22:35.820 Yeah, I totally agree. 00:22:35.820 --> 00:22:37.720 taking a step back real quick. 00:22:37.720 --> 00:22:43.720 Neil also asks, are the small programs in your book, Al, compatible with MicroPython or CircuitPython? 00:22:43.720 --> 00:22:45.780 Probably not. 00:22:45.780 --> 00:22:47.940 I don't know. 00:22:47.940 --> 00:22:50.740 I haven't taken too much of a look at MicroPython. 00:22:51.140 --> 00:22:58.200 but I do try to keep, all the source code as simple as possible and not really rely 00:22:58.200 --> 00:23:00.840 on like the file system or making network connections. 00:23:00.840 --> 00:23:06.520 Mostly it's just standard IO, input output streams for, for text. 00:23:06.520 --> 00:23:12.300 So, you know, if, if it can run print and input, then likely it can, run these programs. 00:23:12.300 --> 00:23:12.820 Yeah. 00:23:12.820 --> 00:23:16.000 Maybe you just have to make the little lights blink and some sort of Morse code. 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:16.600 Yeah. 00:23:16.600 --> 00:23:17.140 Perfect. 00:23:17.140 --> 00:23:18.560 Nice. 00:23:18.880 --> 00:23:19.220 All right. 00:23:19.220 --> 00:23:24.520 Something that is a little bit mysterious to a lot of folks, I think partly because it's 00:23:24.520 --> 00:23:30.160 somewhat discouraged, but not always is from package import star, right? 00:23:30.160 --> 00:23:33.820 Well, sometimes discouraged because you probably shouldn't. 00:23:33.820 --> 00:23:36.400 There probably are situations where you want to do that. 00:23:36.500 --> 00:23:40.480 Like if I've got three sub modules and I want to take the elements in them and then like 00:23:40.480 --> 00:23:45.940 drop them into the top level __init__() for a package so that I can just say package name 00:23:45.940 --> 00:23:48.800 dot items, but not organize them into one giant file. 00:23:48.800 --> 00:23:50.500 For example, that might be reasonable. 00:23:50.620 --> 00:23:58.320 The way that you control that is you work on the dunder all definition at the top of your package, 00:23:58.320 --> 00:23:58.540 right? 00:23:58.540 --> 00:24:02.600 And in there you can say, oh, here are the names of the things that I would like to export. 00:24:02.600 --> 00:24:06.980 If you import star rather than everything, give them these, right? 00:24:06.980 --> 00:24:13.040 Maybe you define some weird thing called Django and it's not meant to override Django or something 00:24:13.040 --> 00:24:13.680 like that, right? 00:24:13.680 --> 00:24:15.040 You want to leave that out. 00:24:15.340 --> 00:24:17.340 So how do you manage that? 00:24:17.340 --> 00:24:23.440 Well, there's this project over on GitHub called auto all, auto dash all. 00:24:23.440 --> 00:24:29.660 And the idea is it somewhat automagically manages the dunder all variable for Python modules. 00:24:29.660 --> 00:24:32.480 So there's a couple of ways in which you can do it. 00:24:32.480 --> 00:24:36.080 You can exclude certain things. 00:24:36.080 --> 00:24:41.060 You can clearly differentiate what's meant to be treated as an external item and what's meant 00:24:41.060 --> 00:24:42.660 to be treated as an internal item. 00:24:43.100 --> 00:24:48.020 You don't have to worry about continuing to update the dunder all and so on. 00:24:48.020 --> 00:24:49.840 So you just pip install it. 00:24:49.840 --> 00:24:56.940 And then the most, it seems like the recommended way, I guess, is you would fall somewhere in 00:24:56.940 --> 00:25:00.300 your script at the top level, like at the function or class level, right? 00:25:00.300 --> 00:25:03.260 No tab space, no spaces, no indentation. 00:25:03.260 --> 00:25:07.360 You say start all, then you write a bunch of code functions and so on. 00:25:07.360 --> 00:25:08.080 And then you say- 00:25:08.080 --> 00:25:09.500 You mean auto all dot start all? 00:25:10.420 --> 00:25:10.820 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:25:10.820 --> 00:25:13.540 If you, if you, yeah, if you, exactly. 00:25:13.540 --> 00:25:14.820 If you import it from there, right? 00:25:14.820 --> 00:25:16.360 I guess you could even import star from there. 00:25:16.360 --> 00:25:19.900 But you say start all, and then you write a bunch of code and then you say end all. 00:25:19.900 --> 00:25:25.160 And then basically between those two markers, those are the things that go into your dunder all 00:25:25.160 --> 00:25:25.640 variable. 00:25:25.640 --> 00:25:27.680 There's something about classes. 00:25:27.680 --> 00:25:31.080 It will not work for classes or variables as well. 00:25:31.080 --> 00:25:32.040 Sorry, take it back. 00:25:32.280 --> 00:25:34.080 It will with the start all, end all. 00:25:34.080 --> 00:25:37.660 But there's also another way that only works on various functions. 00:25:37.660 --> 00:25:42.880 And that is to put a decorator onto the function, which I think, I like this a lot, but the fact 00:25:42.880 --> 00:25:47.240 that it doesn't work with classes, it sounds like that should actually be a PR folks, a little 00:25:47.240 --> 00:25:51.120 thing that, an extra one, like public class or I don't know, whatever. 00:25:51.120 --> 00:25:51.980 But that seems pretty cool. 00:25:51.980 --> 00:25:56.680 So you just say at public on a function, and then that will add it to the dunder all. 00:25:57.020 --> 00:26:00.280 So if you want to export three functions from your module, you just put at public on those. 00:26:00.280 --> 00:26:02.440 And that way, when you're looking at it, it's like really clear. 00:26:02.440 --> 00:26:04.540 These are the public functions and the rest aren't. 00:26:04.540 --> 00:26:09.980 I mean, you could still from module import name, but not through the all, right? 00:26:09.980 --> 00:26:10.480 Yeah. 00:26:10.480 --> 00:26:10.980 Okay. 00:26:10.980 --> 00:26:12.440 Anyway, it looks pretty cool, right? 00:26:12.440 --> 00:26:18.380 Yeah, that is actually a really nice way to just have this automatically taken care of. 00:26:18.380 --> 00:26:24.700 I mean, ideally, you're not really doing the from module import star all too often, or 00:26:24.700 --> 00:26:29.100 rather, ideally, I'm the only person in the entire world that should be allowed to do that. 00:26:29.100 --> 00:26:32.140 And everybody else will have to do it the proper way. 00:26:32.140 --> 00:26:32.880 It's a bad idea. 00:26:32.880 --> 00:26:33.440 Don't do it. 00:26:33.440 --> 00:26:34.360 But it's very handy. 00:26:34.360 --> 00:26:34.680 No. 00:26:34.680 --> 00:26:36.080 Yeah, this is really handy. 00:26:36.080 --> 00:26:36.720 Yeah. 00:26:36.720 --> 00:26:39.680 Dean out there in the live stream says this should work with a context manager. 00:26:39.680 --> 00:26:40.940 Yeah, it probably should. 00:26:40.940 --> 00:26:45.440 I think the challenge would be then you'd have like all of your implementation indented, but 00:26:45.440 --> 00:26:46.300 still pretty cool. 00:26:46.300 --> 00:26:47.000 Yeah. 00:26:47.000 --> 00:26:56.120 So actually, I'm reminded of one of the places I do do import all or import star is in dunder 00:26:56.120 --> 00:26:57.540 init files for packages. 00:26:57.540 --> 00:26:58.540 Yes, exactly. 00:26:58.540 --> 00:27:01.320 In those cases, I often do pull in. 00:27:01.320 --> 00:27:05.560 I've got a couple modules that have my interface and I pull everything in from there. 00:27:06.560 --> 00:27:11.340 So those are cases where that is something that happens. 00:27:11.340 --> 00:27:15.540 And then you're faced with, well, what if I want to put another function that isn't part 00:27:15.540 --> 00:27:16.420 of my public interface? 00:27:16.420 --> 00:27:17.440 Then you have to jump through hoops. 00:27:17.440 --> 00:27:19.720 So I'd probably use it in those cases. 00:27:19.720 --> 00:27:20.720 Yeah. 00:27:20.720 --> 00:27:24.100 I don't think it's broadly applicable, but for the people who are really trying to carefully 00:27:24.100 --> 00:27:26.800 manage their dunder all, it seems nice. 00:27:26.800 --> 00:27:27.480 Straightforward. 00:27:27.480 --> 00:27:27.760 Simple. 00:27:27.760 --> 00:27:28.320 Yeah. 00:27:28.320 --> 00:27:28.780 Yeah. 00:27:28.780 --> 00:27:29.260 Yep. 00:27:29.260 --> 00:27:29.940 All right. 00:27:29.940 --> 00:27:32.860 Al, I think you got the last one, right? 00:27:32.860 --> 00:27:33.500 Yeah. 00:27:33.500 --> 00:27:36.380 So I am working on another book. 00:27:36.380 --> 00:27:39.540 I have a really bad book writing problem. 00:27:39.540 --> 00:27:45.060 I keep thinking that this will be the last one and then I have ideas for 10 or 20 more. 00:27:45.060 --> 00:27:50.720 But the book that I'm currently working on and I'm down to the drafts of the last two chapters 00:27:50.720 --> 00:27:52.120 is a book on recursion. 00:27:52.120 --> 00:27:55.100 So this is currently my untitled recursion book. 00:27:55.760 --> 00:28:03.500 But yeah, I gave a talk at North Bay Python, I believe in 2018 or 2019, that was an introduction 00:28:03.500 --> 00:28:04.320 to recursion. 00:28:04.320 --> 00:28:10.640 And recursion is one of those things where a lot of people find it very intimidating or 00:28:10.640 --> 00:28:12.180 even just outright magical. 00:28:12.180 --> 00:28:17.740 And it's this thing that seems to be like only for advanced programmers or something like 00:28:17.740 --> 00:28:18.020 that. 00:28:18.020 --> 00:28:20.600 But I started taking a look at it. 00:28:20.600 --> 00:28:21.980 Or beginner programmers who make a mistake. 00:28:21.980 --> 00:28:22.900 Oh, yeah. 00:28:22.900 --> 00:28:23.520 Right. 00:28:23.520 --> 00:28:24.020 Exactly. 00:28:24.020 --> 00:28:24.700 Accidentally. 00:28:24.700 --> 00:28:25.620 Just keep calling it. 00:28:25.620 --> 00:28:26.060 Yeah. 00:28:26.060 --> 00:28:27.580 Just for some general background. 00:28:27.580 --> 00:28:31.700 Recursion is when you have a function that calls itself. 00:28:31.700 --> 00:28:35.320 And this is it sounds like it won't work. 00:28:35.320 --> 00:28:36.580 And oftentimes it won't. 00:28:36.580 --> 00:28:41.640 You'll get a sort of an infinite loop of recursive function calls and then it crashes your program. 00:28:41.640 --> 00:28:48.100 But there are recursive algorithms where this is a really handy technique and allows you to 00:28:48.100 --> 00:28:50.980 do really sophisticated things in not that much code. 00:28:50.980 --> 00:28:53.600 However, a lot of people find it really confusing. 00:28:53.800 --> 00:28:57.200 But more than anything, I found that it's just poorly taught. 00:28:57.200 --> 00:29:02.840 Most people will probably learn this from a computer science professor or they'll be studying 00:29:02.840 --> 00:29:06.580 it as a way to prepare for job interviews for the coding section. 00:29:07.240 --> 00:29:11.180 You know, there's a lot of times where people will be writing out an algorithm on a whiteboard 00:29:11.180 --> 00:29:15.380 and their interviewer will say like, OK, and now can you do the recursive version of this 00:29:15.380 --> 00:29:17.940 algorithm as a quick gotcha? 00:29:18.580 --> 00:29:26.080 But yeah, there's the short of it is I realized that a lot of times people don't really teach the concept of the call stack. 00:29:26.080 --> 00:29:35.280 And without explicitly knowing about what a call stack is and how it works, a lot of what recursion does kind of just seems magical because you're missing this huge piece. 00:29:35.280 --> 00:29:37.780 And I found out so many other things about this. 00:29:37.840 --> 00:29:44.720 And so I thought, hey, I could write a quick little tutorial on recursive functions and make a talk. 00:29:44.720 --> 00:29:47.540 And then that just kind of ballooned into a giant book now. 00:29:48.680 --> 00:29:49.880 That's how I end up with courses. 00:29:49.880 --> 00:29:52.080 I'm like, oh, that'd be a neat little thing to play around with. 00:29:52.080 --> 00:29:54.120 Why have I spent the last month doing this? 00:29:54.120 --> 00:29:55.220 Yes. 00:29:55.220 --> 00:30:03.440 So I'm hoping to have this book probably done either at the end of this year or early next year in 2022. 00:30:03.440 --> 00:30:13.900 But yeah, so a book that just covers recursive algorithms and and why people find recursion to be so intimidating and how it really isn't. 00:30:13.900 --> 00:30:19.100 And even how oftentimes it's actually not the best technique to use. 00:30:19.100 --> 00:30:22.000 You just want to write straightforward, simple code. 00:30:22.000 --> 00:30:29.620 But if you really want to show off how smart you are and annoy your coworkers that way, recursion is also really great for that. 00:30:29.620 --> 00:30:34.880 What I like about it is if you have hierarchical data, it matches that really cleanly. 00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:35.360 Yes. 00:30:35.360 --> 00:30:38.020 You want to traverse a tree, but in like a real simple way. 00:30:38.020 --> 00:30:45.700 Or you want to work with an algorithm that is like iterative in the sense like the previous step kind of naturally the answer that leads to the next one. 00:30:45.700 --> 00:30:46.680 Those types of things. 00:30:46.680 --> 00:30:48.700 It's like a super elegant answer. 00:30:48.700 --> 00:30:49.360 Yeah. 00:30:49.360 --> 00:30:57.860 I found that recursive algorithms are really great when your problem has a tree like structure and also involves backtracking. 00:30:58.460 --> 00:31:04.580 Otherwise, there's probably you probably just need a loop or some iterative way of solving it. 00:31:04.580 --> 00:31:08.820 You can also come up with a cool joke like the one we had on episode 236. 00:31:08.820 --> 00:31:12.080 There are so many recursive jokes. 00:31:12.080 --> 00:31:18.340 I actually opened up my talk at North Bay Python with just like, OK, we just got to get that out of our systems. 00:31:18.340 --> 00:31:23.520 Do the whole, you know, in order to learn about recursion, you first have to learn about recursion. 00:31:23.720 --> 00:31:26.360 These jokes that we've heard like millions of times. 00:31:26.360 --> 00:31:27.220 Yeah. 00:31:27.220 --> 00:31:31.860 People can check out the little cartoon graphic thing on episode 236. 00:31:31.860 --> 00:31:32.320 Yeah. 00:31:32.320 --> 00:31:33.620 I was going to ask you if you're right. 00:31:33.620 --> 00:31:35.800 You got anything you want to just throw out there at the end? 00:31:35.800 --> 00:31:39.160 No, I've just been working a lot. 00:31:39.160 --> 00:31:41.100 I was just one question. 00:31:41.100 --> 00:31:45.680 I was just going to think that maybe Al's book was about how to write a book about recursion. 00:31:45.680 --> 00:31:49.720 The making of is something that I've also been thinking of. 00:31:49.720 --> 00:31:54.900 I feel like a book on meta classes and meta programming might be very relevant. 00:31:54.900 --> 00:31:56.900 All right. 00:31:56.900 --> 00:31:58.760 I got a couple of things to cover for my extras. 00:31:58.760 --> 00:31:59.240 OK. 00:31:59.240 --> 00:32:01.940 First, I had talked about Oh My Posh. 00:32:01.940 --> 00:32:07.580 Oh My Posh, which I think is a really cool like Oh My Z shell type of thing. 00:32:07.680 --> 00:32:20.440 But for PowerShell and if you use the new Windows terminal and you get the new PowerShell 7 and set that to be the default, then you get these really beautiful, nice prompts and autocomplete and all those kinds of things. 00:32:20.440 --> 00:32:21.780 So those are really neat. 00:32:21.780 --> 00:32:25.240 People can check that out for all the Posh shell stuff. 00:32:25.800 --> 00:32:30.260 But someone was asking for something that would do a thing that is really cool. 00:32:30.260 --> 00:32:36.020 Like what if what if when I and oh, by the way, because we gave it a shout out, right? 00:32:36.020 --> 00:32:48.080 I was dreaming of something that would automatically activate virtual environments when I seeded into a structure that contained in the tree somewhere a virtual environment, which is cool. 00:32:48.460 --> 00:32:54.740 So they dug around and said, I found this thing called Posh dash Dure Envy, which does that. 00:32:54.740 --> 00:33:01.440 So as you change into the directory, it will automatically activate virtual environments. 00:33:01.440 --> 00:33:02.040 Nice. 00:33:02.040 --> 00:33:02.720 Nice. 00:33:02.720 --> 00:33:03.600 Yeah. 00:33:03.600 --> 00:33:04.920 So that's pretty neat. 00:33:04.920 --> 00:33:06.220 So people can check that out. 00:33:06.220 --> 00:33:07.340 It's a sort of follow up. 00:33:07.340 --> 00:33:08.020 Another thing. 00:33:08.020 --> 00:33:13.440 One of our listeners, Einstein, Vincent, I believe is the one who sent it over. 00:33:13.440 --> 00:33:14.040 Thank you for that. 00:33:14.040 --> 00:33:15.480 Just said, hey, quick shout out. 00:33:15.480 --> 00:33:17.540 Your show has been super helpful to us. 00:33:17.600 --> 00:33:19.820 It's been inspiring a bunch of us scientists. 00:33:19.820 --> 00:33:23.940 We're here in Iceland and I believe also at Harvard, if I recall correctly. 00:33:23.940 --> 00:33:38.320 And they now publish an article using Python, a scalable method of determining physiological endotypes for basically a sleep apnea study of trying to turn this into more of a continuum rather than yes or no. 00:33:38.320 --> 00:33:39.420 You have yes or no. 00:33:39.420 --> 00:33:41.620 You yes do or don't have sleep apnea. 00:33:41.620 --> 00:33:46.680 So really cool just to see listeners listening to the show, using some of the packages and doing cool stuff that help people. 00:33:46.740 --> 00:33:47.220 Yes. 00:33:47.220 --> 00:33:51.000 one more follow up to three more follow ups, actually. 00:33:51.000 --> 00:33:52.620 But next one really quickly. 00:33:52.620 --> 00:34:00.580 I've been having such a challenge with email for two years and I have finally, I think solved it. 00:34:00.580 --> 00:34:01.380 The beast. 00:34:01.600 --> 00:34:07.120 I believe I have had hundreds of emails from years ago that needed action. 00:34:07.120 --> 00:34:12.600 And finally, I've gotten back to almost everybody down to just a handful of emails and I'll have them all done. 00:34:12.600 --> 00:34:14.500 But anyway, I want to recommend two email clients. 00:34:14.500 --> 00:34:15.680 One for the Mac is Newton. 00:34:15.680 --> 00:34:16.400 Pretty cool. 00:34:16.500 --> 00:34:20.820 And then I'm going to give superhuman a try, but it takes a while to get set up on that. 00:34:21.460 --> 00:34:23.480 If you're out there struggling with email, check those out. 00:34:23.480 --> 00:34:26.400 And so we've heard about cloud computing. 00:34:26.400 --> 00:34:28.380 That's where you might run your program in the cloud. 00:34:28.380 --> 00:34:31.520 You've heard about virtual environment or sorry, virtual machines. 00:34:31.520 --> 00:34:36.440 That's where you might fire up a computer that runs in a container or a virtual hypervisor. 00:34:36.600 --> 00:34:39.400 And then you can interact with that in like its own little way. 00:34:39.400 --> 00:34:42.660 But Microsoft, apparently I was just reading like 15 minutes before we started. 00:34:42.660 --> 00:34:43.560 I thought I'd throw this in there. 00:34:43.560 --> 00:34:52.320 They just reveal not just Windows 11, but Windows 365, which is basically you buy Windows and the thing hosted in the cloud. 00:34:52.320 --> 00:34:54.600 So you just like in a web browser to it or something. 00:34:54.600 --> 00:34:57.580 And then you have a computer with all your files that's instantly on. 00:34:57.580 --> 00:34:58.360 So I don't know. 00:34:58.360 --> 00:34:59.380 I thought that was kind of interesting. 00:34:59.380 --> 00:35:00.080 Throw that out there. 00:35:00.080 --> 00:35:03.680 It's like Office 365, except the entire operating system. 00:35:03.680 --> 00:35:06.360 The entire computer with all your files like saved there. 00:35:06.440 --> 00:35:06.860 Yeah, exactly. 00:35:06.860 --> 00:35:07.860 Probably expensive. 00:35:07.860 --> 00:35:08.440 I have no idea. 00:35:08.440 --> 00:35:09.560 Last thing. 00:35:09.560 --> 00:35:12.620 We talked about Flock No, right? 00:35:12.620 --> 00:35:18.260 We talked about Flock and the vanishing of third-party cookies and the stuff that Google is trying to do. 00:35:18.260 --> 00:35:21.300 And then remember that Brian, you pointed out they received significant feedback. 00:35:21.300 --> 00:35:23.620 That was not totally positive for them. 00:35:23.620 --> 00:35:24.060 Yeah. 00:35:24.060 --> 00:35:33.060 So, you know, parallel to that, I think, is really interesting is that Apple also had their do not track thing that they put on their phone, which is fine. 00:35:33.060 --> 00:35:35.360 But I think it just needs to be way more than that. 00:35:35.400 --> 00:35:36.320 But yeah, so they have that. 00:35:36.320 --> 00:35:40.560 And would you be surprised that only 25% of the people said, yes, please track me? 00:35:40.560 --> 00:35:43.920 I'm actually surprised that 25% of the people said yes. 00:35:43.920 --> 00:35:47.360 Like, if it's over 5%, it's blowing my mind, right? 00:35:47.360 --> 00:35:47.700 Like, yeah. 00:35:47.700 --> 00:35:49.560 Who's saying yes? 00:35:50.860 --> 00:35:51.380 Exactly. 00:35:51.380 --> 00:35:52.620 So here's an article. 00:35:52.620 --> 00:35:58.180 Facebook and its advertisers are panicking as the majority of iPhone users opt out of tracking. 00:35:58.180 --> 00:36:05.760 And I saw that 20% of ad spend has now moved away from iPhone and towards Android because Android doesn't, you know, they're happy to track you. 00:36:05.760 --> 00:36:06.340 That's Google. 00:36:06.340 --> 00:36:06.760 Yeah. 00:36:07.240 --> 00:36:09.880 But also just I think it's very meta and funny. 00:36:09.880 --> 00:36:16.880 So I have my VPN that has a ad blocker plus cyber, like basically virus malware detector at the network layer. 00:36:16.880 --> 00:36:19.860 Notice there's a big gap in me showing you this article up here. 00:36:19.860 --> 00:36:24.640 That's as we're trying to show me the ad about the advertisers and my network. 00:36:24.880 --> 00:36:26.960 My VPN is blocking it, which I just love it. 00:36:26.960 --> 00:36:30.960 So anyway, those are all the things that I had to share there. 00:36:30.960 --> 00:36:32.900 Al, you got anything else you want to throw out there for everyone? 00:36:32.900 --> 00:36:33.620 Yeah. 00:36:33.620 --> 00:36:39.480 Outside of the books, I'm also working on my open source project called PyAutoGUI. 00:36:39.480 --> 00:36:46.280 This is a GUI automation module for Python where it's a module that lets your Python scripts control the mouse and keyboard. 00:36:46.280 --> 00:36:53.600 So if you have some software that you want to automatically click and type things into, you can write a script using PyAutoGUI to do that. 00:36:53.700 --> 00:36:58.220 It works on Python 2 and 3 and also on Windows, macOS and Linux. 00:36:58.220 --> 00:37:04.060 I feel like I've been neglecting this project for the longest time, but more and more people are using it. 00:37:04.060 --> 00:37:12.200 So I really want to start adding more and more features to bring it up to speed with a lot of other GUI automation libraries that are out there. 00:37:12.200 --> 00:37:16.780 So if anybody is interested in contributing, I have the GitHub link. 00:37:16.780 --> 00:37:22.520 And you can also just Google for PyAutoGUI to find more information about that. 00:37:22.860 --> 00:37:25.520 That's cool. I found out by Googling with DuckDuckGo. 00:37:25.520 --> 00:37:26.160 Yes. 00:37:26.160 --> 00:37:30.700 I still have a problem saying Google as the verb. 00:37:30.700 --> 00:37:32.120 No, I do too. 00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:38.620 I finally got over using guys as a general neutral pronoun, but now I still have problems saying Google all the time. 00:37:38.620 --> 00:37:38.860 Yeah. 00:37:38.860 --> 00:37:40.460 It's all hard. 00:37:40.460 --> 00:37:41.980 By the way, notice over here. 00:37:42.260 --> 00:37:45.520 I still have trouble not telling people to MapQuest something. 00:37:45.520 --> 00:37:46.680 Yeah, I know. 00:37:47.520 --> 00:37:52.540 It's good, except those little arrows to move each around on the map of little bars on each side. 00:37:52.540 --> 00:37:53.920 It's so clunky. 00:37:53.920 --> 00:37:57.140 And you got to print the thing out for like five pages and follow the pictures. 00:37:57.140 --> 00:38:02.280 No, but so one thing I do want to give a quick shout out to the guys that read the docs, Eric and crew over there. 00:38:02.820 --> 00:38:07.140 Like they have an ad right here and it says sponsored ads serve ethically. 00:38:07.140 --> 00:38:08.500 You know what that's based on? 00:38:08.500 --> 00:38:10.240 Not tracking and retargeting. 00:38:10.240 --> 00:38:13.520 That's just, hey, there's something to do with this Python project. 00:38:13.520 --> 00:38:16.960 So this ad has to do with the context of what is here. 00:38:16.960 --> 00:38:19.820 It's relevant to the content I'm already looking at. 00:38:19.820 --> 00:38:20.860 Good old fashioned. 00:38:20.860 --> 00:38:21.720 That's astounding. 00:38:22.380 --> 00:38:24.880 Just like magazines and newspapers and stuff like that. 00:38:24.880 --> 00:38:27.980 And it's not about finding hot singles in my local area. 00:38:27.980 --> 00:38:30.700 That's great. 00:38:30.700 --> 00:38:31.540 Exactly. 00:38:31.540 --> 00:38:32.820 All right. 00:38:32.820 --> 00:38:33.480 Cool. 00:38:33.480 --> 00:38:34.000 Yeah. 00:38:34.000 --> 00:38:34.440 Cool. 00:38:34.440 --> 00:38:34.880 Thanks. 00:38:34.880 --> 00:38:36.820 Thanks, Al, for joining us today. 00:38:36.820 --> 00:38:38.380 And Brian, as always. 00:38:38.380 --> 00:38:39.620 Thanks for having me. 00:38:39.620 --> 00:38:40.320 Yeah, you bet. 00:38:40.320 --> 00:38:41.420 Thanks, everyone, for listening. 00:38:41.420 --> 00:38:43.260 Thanks for listening to Python Bytes. 00:38:43.260 --> 00:38:46.060 Follow the show on Twitter via at Python Bytes. 00:38:46.060 --> 00:38:49.160 That's Python Bytes as in B-Y-T-E-S. 00:38:49.160 --> 00:38:51.980 Get the full show notes over at Pythonbytes.fm. 00:38:52.300 --> 00:38:56.860 If you have a news item we should cover, just visit Pythonbytes.fm and click submit in the 00:38:56.860 --> 00:38:57.280 nav bar. 00:38:57.280 --> 00:38:59.400 We're always on the lookout for sharing something cool. 00:38:59.400 --> 00:39:03.860 If you want to join us for the live recording, just visit the website and click live stream 00:39:03.860 --> 00:39:06.740 to get notified of when our next episode goes live. 00:39:06.740 --> 00:39:11.100 That's usually happening at noon Pacific on Wednesdays over at YouTube. 00:39:11.100 --> 00:39:14.460 On behalf of myself and Brian Okken, this is Michael Kennedy. 00:39:14.460 --> 00:39:18.180 Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues.