#379: Constable on the debugging case

00:00 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds.

00:04 This is episode 379 recorded April 16th and I am Brian Okken.

00:10 And I'm Michael Kennedy.

00:11 This week we are sponsored by us, Talk Python training courses and also the pytest course

00:18 and our Patreon supporters. We love everybody that supports us. We really appreciate it.

00:23 And if you'd like to connect with us, we're all on Fostadon, on Mastodon. So it's at mkennedy,

00:30 at Brian Okken and at Python Bytes. And I wanted to shout out to myself, I guess, and Michael for

00:36 we're doing a newsletter now. So if you head over to pythonbytes.fm and join the friends of the show

00:45 list, we will send you an email with all of the tidbits. So if you happen to miss an episode,

00:50 you can catch up on all the links that we share. So Michael, why don't you kick us off with our first

00:57 topic? Let's get started, huh? So I want to talk about an article by Stephanie Molin. She put together

01:05 this really nice article on something that I don't use very much, Git Precommit Hooks. Do you use Git

01:10 Precommit Hooks? Not, yes, on some projects. Yeah. And I just think there's a lot of possibility for

01:17 interesting things there. And, you know, I've considered it, but you don't want stuff that like

01:23 takes a long time to run there. So like how much value do you get? But nowadays with tools like

01:28 Ruff and others that run really quickly, it's basically you wouldn't even really notice it,

01:33 right? So it's not a lot of overhead. So maybe it's time to reconsider Git Precommit Hooks. And

01:40 she has a really nice walkthrough here. So I just kind of want to set out some of the motivation and

01:44 kind of call attention to this article. People can come check it out and set up Precommit Hooks for

01:49 themselves. So why do you care about these things? They give developers near instant feedback of code

01:54 locally. So not all, but some of the things that would run in continuous integration, like linting

02:00 checks and other types of checks run. And when you try to do a Git commit, and if it, for some reason,

02:07 there's a problem, right? Like it won't even let you commit. It'll say, no, it can't commit.

02:11 But you've got to fix the issue detected by the precommit hook. So it's kind of a gate

02:16 before stuff actually gets into broader source control world. And, you know, super valuable if

02:22 you're on a team, but also if you just want to make sure like, I kind of want to make sure I'm doing

02:25 this for myself for my own project, or I'm working alone at a company, and I still want to make sure

02:30 these things happen, then throw them in there. That's for you. Also, the continuous integration side of

02:35 thing is pretty excellent. So here, she's using a project, I believe by Anthony Sotili,

02:42 called precommit. And precommit is a Python project, but it's not only for Python things and Git and

02:50 source control. It just happens to run on Python, like some things run on C, some things run on Rust.

02:54 That's what runs on Python. So basically, as long as you can run Python things, you have an interpreter,

02:59 you can use precommit for whatever projects, you know, if you're a React native person, you could

03:04 use precommit for it, right? Yeah. So there's a nice example of showing how to set up a bunch of checks.

03:09 And it's super easy. Basically, you set up pre-commit-config-yaml file or .yaml. And then you

03:16 specify different things to run. And so you can say, I want to run the hooks forward, check the format for

03:22 the toml file, check the format for yaml files, make sure that every file ends with a blank line,

03:28 trim out all white, trailing white space, all those kinds. Those are all pretty simple and pretty nice,

03:34 right? Yes. Another one is throw in the rough precommit. And then I'll just say, run rough and run rough

03:41 format, which will fix up the things. And you can even pass arguments, do it through these precommit

03:47 hooks here, which is pretty cool. Yeah. So, you know, that's pretty much it. Once you set up your file, you just

03:53 have to run precommit install, which will, you know, download all the hooks that you've mentioned

03:59 that you want to run, all the checkers. And it'll actually create virtual environments for those and

04:04 install them in there. So the first time it's a little bit slow, but then the next time it's

04:07 plenty quick. And finally, if for some reason you're like, you know what, I know it keeps complaining,

04:12 but this time I just need it to commit because for whatever reason you can use down here,

04:18 find it, you can specify get commit --no verify. And that'll just say it's going in.

04:24 I don't care. It's going in if you need to kind of override it. So yeah, it's pretty straightforward,

04:29 really nice write up and people can check that out. If the idea appeals.

04:33 This is a great timing for this because I have used it in years past and there's times where I've

04:40 added like a whole bunch of stuff and it kind of slows down my process. But with the recent

04:46 rustification of a lot of a lot of our tools, like with rough and stuff, things are pretty zippy

04:53 now. So I don't think it'll slow down things that much. Yeah. I doubt you really even notice it,

04:58 you know? Yeah. For depending on what kind of tools you can do. When it fails, you'll notice.

05:02 Yeah. And I do like the, the shout out. There's a couple of things I love about this. I like the

05:07 shout out to the no verify because there's times where you're, you're just running off to vacation

05:11 and you have to commit your stuff no matter what, get that in there. Especially if it's on a,

05:16 like a brand developer branch or something. Yeah. That's a good point. If it's not on the main

05:21 branch, but you're like, you know what? I'm just going to put it here because I want to get it over

05:24 to my laptop and I'm leaving. Yeah. I need it saved. The other thing is running down some of the,

05:31 the rough settings. So I love, I love some of the configuration that she's included with,

05:35 with like how to configure rough. Cause rough, rough is awesome by default, but there's some cool

05:42 configuration you can do like setting, setting the quote style to single and stuff like that. So neat.

05:49 Very, very neat. Yeah. Stephanie's doing a bunch of cool stuff. So people should check out broadly

05:54 what she's up to, but this article is really nice. Yeah. Over to you, Ryan.

05:57 Well, I want to talk about something I talked about two years ago. So I was researching this

06:03 Diftastic and I'm like, I'm, I'm really loving this, this tool. I got to cover it. And I apparently

06:09 covered it two years ago, but I didn't, I haven't started using it until just recently. So

06:15 Diftastic is a tool and I, I think it's written in Rust. I'm not sure actually, but it's a super fast

06:24 Dift tool and it's, it does coloring, but there's a lot of stuff I love about it. The reasons why I'm

06:30 using it a lot. The colors are great, by the way. Awesome. Nice red, green, different colors.

06:36 But what I really love is that it's not, it's a Dift tool. That's not a line by line character by

06:43 character Dift. It's, it understands your syntax and it only changes things that really change. So if you

06:49 happen to add a new line in there or something, it's not going to show you that Dift. It's going to do

06:55 just real changes to your code, which is super helpful. I hate it when, when you have to like

07:01 turn off by default, it doesn't show you that. So I, I don't like to see if somebody, if I messed up

07:08 some spacing and somebody fixed that, that's not a real Dift. I don't need to see that. So having

07:13 syntax based is great. What I really love is what I've I'm going to highlight here is there's,

07:19 there's instructions. Oh, it tells you how to do it. And I can't remember where the link is,

07:24 but it, it, I'm going to show it right here. The, the, in the manual for a get tastic or Diftastic,

07:30 it shows you how to set this up for diff. So you can forget diff. So if you're using with get,

07:36 and you, you know, you want to just try it out, it shows you how to just set your get external diff,

07:42 and then you can try it out. What I really love is the real winner is doing a log. So

07:49 showing what you've done on the file recently is great with the get log. But if you do that with

07:55 the external diff of Diftastic, it's a fantastic experience, especially if you've got a large screen,

08:02 which I do right now. And it just makes things working with get so much easier. So definitely,

08:07 if you haven't tried Diftastic yet, try it and try, try the, so it shows you how to do it just

08:13 like one-offs for get, but it also, it shows you how to set up your get configs so that you can use it

08:20 all the time. So this is fantastic. Yeah. Very excellent. Are you starting to use it?

08:25 I'm using it every day now. It's just part of my workflow. So yeah.

08:30 Mike Fieler out in the audience says, Diftastic is indeed in Rust.

08:36 Yeah. It's, it's one of those, it's super fast. I love, I'm going to have to start learning Rust,

08:41 I guess, maybe, but, or, or just, I just love other people writing Rust for me so that I can,

08:46 I can write my Python even faster.

08:48 So it's like, it's kind of like when you use Jupyter notebooks, you don't have to learn TypeScript

08:52 and JavaScript and all those things. You can just use them and appreciate that someone else took one

08:57 for the team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So awesome.

09:01 All right. Actually speaking exactly of that kind of stuff, the next thing I wanted to give a shout

09:05 out to here, the next topic is Quarto. Have you heard of Quarto? I don't believe so.

09:10 Yeah. So Quarto is pretty cool. It lives solidly in the, I want to publish stuff for various reasons,

09:18 maybe because I want a blog or a website or I want to write an ebook, or I just want to create a webpage

09:24 that shows my, my research or visualizations for my company or something like that. So basically it's

09:31 an open source scientific and technical publishing system based on Jupyter notebooks. And a lot of people

09:38 have been talking about this and recommending this lately. So I thought I'd give it a look. And so the

09:43 idea is you write in Jupyter notebooks with plain text or markdown or whatever you want to use.

09:49 And then you create the dynamic elements in Python, R, Julia, or observable. The role has always been an

09:55 adjective. I didn't know it was a noun, but okay. Yeah. I may have to check that out later, but

10:01 basically most relevant point is you write, you can write your stuff in Python and then you can create

10:07 production quality articles, dashboards, websites, blogs, and even EPUB books. So HTML, PDF, even Word,

10:16 EPUB and so on, which is pretty awesome. And then it's, it comes out of the Posit books. You can connect

10:22 it to Posit Connect if you want, but then you can write in hand doc markdown as well and get like

10:28 fancy math equation type things, you know, like integral from zero to infinity of that, to that. And

10:34 right. It looks proper, like you would see in calculus class, not weird ASCII representations to

10:41 it. So yeah, it looks, it looks pretty awesome. It has ability to like show or hide the code. You can

10:46 go to their website, you can see like there's a little example of here's a notebook and then here's

10:50 actually publication of it, which I don't know. I think it's, it's pretty cool. What do you think,

10:55 Brian? I think this is excellent. I definitely want to try this out. I've been itching to write more

11:00 long form and doing, doing something like this would be great. I think it would, especially if

11:06 you use Python to sort of express what you're working on or what you're doing, right? Yeah.

11:11 Super, super cool. Yeah. And pan doc, it's cool. They're using pan doc markdown because,

11:15 I mean, markdown is amazing, but the pan docs flavors of markdown, there's a bunch of cool

11:20 extensions. So that's pretty neat. Yeah. Also final thing you compare, apparently can embed things like

11:27 Jupyter widgets, HTML, widgets and others to let people sort of interact with the page as well,

11:33 which is also cool. Yeah. Neat. Yeah. All right. So this is your world. Check it out.

11:39 Definitely. Okay. Next, I want to talk about Constable. So this is a simple,

11:48 a simple debugging tool. Looks like it's fairly new. Look at that. So Constable.

11:55 Commit four days ago. If you find yourself aimlessly adding print statements while debugging

12:02 your code, this, this might be for you. So this is actually pretty neat. Oh, I like it.

12:08 See, throw like a, in the example that you throw a decorator at constable.trace, and then you can

12:15 throw in which variables you want to trace. And it just like, it shows you some cool output of like

12:21 what happens while you're, while you're running. And the, you can walk through and it does the

12:26 changes to your, which line changed your variable and what did it change it to and all that sort of

12:32 stuff. And it's kind of a. Each line that changes, right? It, it prints out like as the variables

12:38 change at any step, it'll say, here's what the new values are, which is cool, but it kind of describes

12:43 it, which is awesome. It'll say like this equation ran. So now it's a new, this statement ran. So

12:47 here's the value of this statement ran. So now here's the value. It's, it's really good.

12:51 Yeah. It's, it's fairly verbose, but, and with, with a lot of spacing in here, but I think that's

12:57 good is because you're, you're probably going to like throw it on just a couple of functions to

13:01 when you're debugging at the time and then pull it out.

13:03 Is it production?

13:04 Don't put it in production. I was wondering this too. So I forgot the name of the, the, the other tool

13:10 that was kind of like this. And Mike Felder or Fiedler says, I wonder how constable compares to

13:16 ice cream. And I think, I think I would take this as Mike is volunteering to do a write-up of comparing

13:23 constable and ice cream.

13:25 Definitely. Thanks, Mike.

13:26 Sounds. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Let us know when that's written up and we'll take a look.

13:30 No. I, I think, I, I think probably a lot of this is just a probably feel like, how's it feel to you

13:38 if it fits your workflow or not? So this, this looks fun. So yeah, this looks very fun and both are new

13:44 to me. So it's, it's worth checking out. Okay. And if Mike doesn't want to do it, maybe I'll take a

13:49 look at comparing constable. Excellent. You could write it in quarter. Yeah. Yeah. So apparently Mike

13:57 didn't, didn't, was surprised at, you know, the volunteering. So anyway, so yeah, constable for

14:07 debugging print statements or it's easier than print statements. Yeah. Nice. Cool. I'm going to work

14:12 it into my, my world. I think it looks good. What do you got for us next? Extra, extra stuff. It's all,

14:20 I have only one extra thing. Oh, we're done with our topics already? I'm blue. So we are flies when you

14:25 have fun, you know, and you're cool. I flies. All right. So at least I'm done. I've got nothing

14:30 else. How's that? So two pieces of news here. They're all, they're both the same piece of news.

14:37 So Python 312.3 final is out, which comes with one, two, three, four security updates. They don't sound

14:46 like any sort of big deal. So, wouldn't like run, run and patch it now or anything, but there are

14:54 some things that sit under security. So that's always worth thinking about, but there's also quite a few

14:58 changes under built-in under library. I mean, just gauging by the scrolling, I would say there's probably 50 or 60

15:06 changes. That's a big change for a dot three dot tutor dot three. Yeah. Yeah. and why not?

15:11 Why not upgrade? So absolutely. And I would, just the other piece of news is that Python bytes and

15:19 all the other, other things are already running on a 312.3, just bump a number, kick off the, the Docker

15:27 update and boom. Yeah. Very nice to have that, that set up in place. Extras for you. just one that I

15:34 like was excited to cover, but then like, okay, so I'll just, I'll just talk about it. It's a couple

15:39 of, you appear to be offline. it's a couple weeks old, but pointers are going to be added

15:46 to the standard library with PEP for what? Yeah. What? apparently, Guida says, you know,

15:53 why the hell not? why not add pointers? This will induce, it, this will also introduce,

15:58 pointer literals size of operators and memory errors. actually I was perusing Reddit in

16:05 Python and noticed this and I'm like, what's going on. And then I noticed the date was 15

16:10 days ago. That would have been April fools. April 1st. So rough. I actually got off,

16:15 rough.

16:16 snagged on this. This is sort of funny though.

16:19 This is funny. I even has the C syntax, like ampersand to grab the pointer of a variable,

16:26 a star to dereference the pointer. It's all sorts of stuff.

16:28 Yeah. Malik.

16:29 Malik. Why not?

16:30 Why not?

16:31 New size of operator.

16:34 the irony is everything in Python as a pointer. You just can't directly address them. Right.

16:39 You can't, you can't work with them that way. no pass by rep. There's no pat like pass

16:44 reference, you know, the, the ampersand operator and C where like you could change the value of

16:49 the pointer, like within somewhere else. And so what, I love this example, spam equals star

16:54 of none. that's that will seg fault core dump. Good luck kiddo.

17:01 But this is good. I enjoy it. So yeah. All right.

17:05 People comments are like nice when I believed it. I believed it.

17:08 I believed it for a second except for, you know, anyway, but there is a infamous pointers.py.

17:14 So is that a real thing you can know bringing the hell of pointers to Python

17:19 from pointers and poor underscore.

17:22 That's funny. Anyway. all right. So, this is, this is the ball, right? Involved. This is,

17:31 in-depth that wasn't just a Reddit post. It's got like a whole GitHub repo.

17:35 Yeah. Example. There's like a ton of code here. What are they doing?

17:38 this is awesome. Why does this exist? Anyway.

17:44 Liz out in the audience says I would have believed it too.

17:47 one of the features is seg faults.

17:51 always a good time. Always a good time. Yeah. All right. So, that was funny,

17:57 but do you have anything else funny for us?

17:59 I do. And it's very much in the same vein, although I don't think it's the same date.

18:04 I think it's just more random. So check this out.

18:06 Hennick from the Python community who we speak about often is here holding this award.

18:13 That is a Hugo, you know, Hugo, the, not the static site generator, but the,

18:17 the awards for, It's like a sci-fi award or something.

18:21 Yeah. For best sci-fi science fiction. So here's the thing.

18:25 Very happy to accept a Hugo award for my science fiction short story.

18:29 The day Python packaging made everyone happy.

18:32 Good work, Hennick.

18:38 That is, that is excellent.

18:40 Someday.

18:42 And the science fiction is, is a good angle here. Right.

18:46 Because science fiction is the sort of stuff that's not real now, but you can imagine maybe, but probably not.

18:52 At some point in the future, like the year 3000.

18:55 Well, I'll be fine.

18:56 Yeah. Well, I, well, I don't believe anything until I get my hover skateboard.

19:01 I know.

19:02 So we're just going to be, all it's going to be about is people crashing and falling over backwards on YouTube,

19:07 on the hover skateboard once we all get them.

19:09 Well, yeah.

19:10 Just like the ones with wheels now, but now when you hover, you'll even more tippy.

19:15 Still fine.

19:15 I'm trying to figure out how you turn on something that hovers.

19:18 I know.

19:19 But anyway, all right.

19:21 All right.

19:22 Well, thanks.

19:22 This was fun.

19:23 A pretty quick episode, but, Oh, Mike says, hover skateboard uses pointers,

19:31 and seg faults.

19:32 Yeah.

19:34 so, and then we can get like, we can get Devin and, AI to create, seg faults for us.

19:41 Yeah.

19:41 That'd be awesome.

19:42 Not my fault.

19:43 I didn't take down production.

19:44 Devin did.

19:45 I wonder if the segue is written in C.

19:47 I wonder if segways have seg faults.

19:49 I bet they do.

19:50 Yeah.

19:50 It would be fitting.

19:52 all right.

19:54 Well, thanks everybody for showing up.

19:56 If you want to, and if you're listening and you want to join the fun of talking with us while we're doing a podcast,

20:03 head over to python by set FM and you can see what the schedule is for the next live episode.

20:09 Indeed.

20:10 Thanks, Ryan.