zephyrfalcon

>> Go was created to be a faster Python

That would surprise me; Go has little in common with Python.

Location: Jacksonville, FL

Remote: yes (although willing to consider local positions)

Willing to relocate: no (that is not an option for me at this moment, unfortunately)

Technologies: Python, relational databases (SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres), web crawling, GUI development, SQLAlchemy, ETL, Scheme, Prolog, Lisp, etc (always eager to pick up new programming languages or technologies)

Resume/CV: http://aquila.blue/misc/resume.html

Github: http://github.com/zephyrfalcon

also: http://bitbucket.org/zephyrfalcon

and: http://gitlab.com/zephyrfalcon

Email: zephyrfalcon at gmail.com

Note: Looking for part-time work if at all possible, but not unwilling to do full-time again.

SEEKING WORK -- Jacksonville, FL -- remote/freelance

I am an experienced Python developer, having used the language in all kinds of areas and situations, including web development (Django, Pylons, Google App Engine, Flask, CherryPy, etc), GUI development, database access (using MS SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres, among other things), scripting, backend development, automated testing, data extraction and parsing/ETL, etc.

I am looking for part-time work if at all possible (although full-time would be OK too). If you are looking to get a small project done, or you have an existing project where some maintenance work needs to be done on a regular basis, then I would love to hear from you.

I am also available for technical writing (I kept a programming blog for many years, mostly about Python).

(For the record: Although Python is my main programming language, I am also interested in, and have worked with, many other programming languages, including C, D, Delphi, Go, C#/Mono, Ruby, OCaml, Prolog, Lisp, Scheme, etc, on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems. I am also available to work on projects in these languages.)

Website: http://aquila.blue

Email: zephyrfalcon at gmail.com

There was. I used to maintain one for a while, compiled with DJGPP, long ago (obviously). Links might still work: https://web.archive.org/web/20080828160609/http://zephyrfalc...

SEEKING WORK -- Jacksonville, FL -- remote/freelance

I am an experienced Python developer, having used the language in all kinds of areas and situations, including web development (Django, Pylons, Google App Engine, Flask, CherryPy, etc), GUI development, database access (using MS SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres, among other things), scripting, backend development, automated testing, data extraction and parsing/ETL, etc.

I am looking for part-time work if at all possible (although full-time would be OK too). If you are looking to get a small project done, or you have an existing project where some maintenance work needs to be done on a regular basis, then I would love to hear from you.

I am also available for technical writing (I kept a programming blog for many years, mostly about Python).

(For the record: Although Python is my main programming language, I am also interested in, and have worked with, many other programming languages, including C, D, Delphi, Go, C#/Mono, Ruby, OCaml, Prolog, Lisp, Scheme, etc, on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems. I am also available to work on projects in these languages.)

Website: http://aquila.blue

Email: zephyrfalcon at gmail.com

Location: Jacksonville, FL Remote: yes (although willing to consider local positions)

Willing to relocate: no (that is not an option for me at this moment, unfortunately)

Technologies: Python, relational databases (SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres), web crawling, GUI development, SQLAlchemy, ETL, Scheme, Prolog, Lisp, etc (always eager to pick up new programming languages or technologies)

Resume/CV: http://aquila.blue/misc/resume.html

Github: http://github.com/zephyrfalcon

also: http://bitbucket.org/zephyrfalcon

and: http://gitlab.com/zephyrfalcon

Email: zephyrfalcon at gmail.com

Note: Looking for part-time work if at all possible, but not unwilling to do full-time again.

It does not mention how the question was put, and in which context. If it was clear from the start that the OP was expected to use OO, then it would not be smart to start with the bitboard implementation and then continue to argue about it. ... But if the question simply was, "how would you design a chess game", with no other context, then it would be reasonable to assume that the interviewer would want to hear your best solution... and for that he chose the non-OO bitboard version, based on his previous experience with chess engines.

Location: Jacksonville, FL

Remote: yes (although willing to consider local positions)

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Python, relational databases (SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres), web crawling, GUI development, SQLAlchemy, ETL, Scheme, Prolog, etc (always eager to pick up new programming languages or technologies)

Resume/CV: http://aquila.blue/misc/resume.html

Github: http://github.com/zephyrfalcon

also: http://bitbucket.org/zephyrfalcon

and: http://gitlab.com/zephyrfalcon

Email: zephyrfalcon at gmail.com

Note: Looking for part-time work if at all possible, but not unwilling to do full-time again.

There is this one that sort of fits the bill: http://www.sacred-texts.com/

But that might not be the one you mean... I recall one with a black background... hmm.

/edit/ I also found this one: http://www.crystalinks.com/ ...I (probably badly) archived a copy of it around 2000/2001, back then many pages had dark graphical backgrounds. It seems that has changed.

There was also the Temple of the Screaming Electron, which has since disappeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOTSE

"""Typical code density ratio of Python versus AWK is 10:1, sometimes more. This means that if you have a 650 line Python program, you can implement the same functionality in about 280 lines of AWK, and the program will be far simpler. I've once collapsed a 280+ line Python program into a simple 15 lines of code in AWK."""

How does this work? I am not saying it can't be done, but the main benefit of Awk seems to be quick one-liners, which are possible because you get "records" (splitting on whitespace) and lines (splitting on newline) and looping for free. But for larger programs, this easily translates to Python; just call readlines(), loop over it, call split() on each line. I would think that at this point, Awk doesn't have much of an advantage anymore... but apparently your experiences are different. What are some Awk constructs that would take a lot more code in Python?

Location: Jacksonville, FL

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, unfortunately that is not an option at this point

Technologies: Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, Delphi, C, C#, Ruby, Scheme, Prolog, Lisp, D, Rebol, Go, OCaml, Google App Engine, parsing/ETL, web crawlers, scripting

Resume: http://aquila.blue/misc/resume.html

Email: zephyrfalcon at gmail.com

I have over 20 years of experience with Python, and have used it in all kinds of situations and environments. I have also worked with many other programming languages (a bit of a hobby of mine). I am always looking to learn new technologies.

I'm not sure that was the predominant reason. The search results were also a hell of a lot better than AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and whatever else was around back then.

Same for the Netherlands. I read this every day rather than the big newspapers or news channels...

https://nos.nl/teletekst

"""I recommend taking a look at linguist Arika Okrent's book "Into the Land of Invented Languages"""

I used to have that book... I didn't think it was very good. I wanted to learn more about the various conlangs, but instead the author mostly focused on their creators, and then especially their idiosyncrasies and quirks.

For those who want to know more about conlangs, I would recommend "The Language Construction Kit" by Mark Rosenfelder.

"""All of the business logic was in stored procedures. I've seen a stored procedure with triple nested cursors spanning 2000 lines. Our 'senior' developer would take weeks to make changes to this thing."""

I remember when this was the thing to do; to store as much as possible in stored procs. Fat server (the server here being the database server), thin client.

That has changed, and changed again, and no doubt it will be different in the future again. The problem with our profession is that it isn't always easy to determine which changes are actual progress, and which are a fad or fashion.

(Anecdotally: I also remember having to replace ~100 lines of Python with ~60 stored procs and views in Access. This was code that was very unsuitable to be done in a database. The Python code did the job fast, and was readable and understandable; the Access queries were NOT, and it took them minutes to do the same thing. But, management considered Python "unmaintainable" because it was "an obscure language"... so they preferred the Access "solution".)

"""I think his point, and it's a valid one, is that Python has practically re-invented private members with special underscore handling anyway -- just more half-assed."""

It was added more as a kind of "stop gap" for people who complained about the lack of private/protected attributes. That's why it is indeed half-assed. :) And that's also why hardly anybody uses it, especially the double underscore thing.

"""Significant whitespace was considered a bad idea in days long past but that lesson was forgotten."""

Who exactly considered it a bad idea and why?

I left the Netherlands 15 years ago, but if I recall correctly, entrapment is mostly illegal, and cops usually don't care very much about bike theft, which is very low on their priority list. From what I understand, rampant bike theft is less of a problem outside of Amsterdam (and maybe a few other "big" cities).

(I never had my bike stolen, living in an urban area in the south of the Netherlands. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen there... if you leave your bike standing in odd places, it may well be gone when you come back. One way employed by thieves was to drive around with a van and just pick up any bikes that were standing around, locked or not, in broad daylight or not.)

"""The fact that Python's rule used to be 8 spaces, then got changed to 4 thereby invalidating old code really showed me how shortsighted it is to use a set number of spaces in a whitespace sensitive language."""

When exactly did it use 8 spaces? I have been using Python since 1996 and I don't recall this 8-spaces thing. Almost all code I've seen uses 4 spaces.

In any case, it doesn't matter because, as another commenter pointed out, as long as your indentation is consistent, your code will work just fine, no matter how many spaces you use for indentation. Even if some code does use 8 spaces, it should work without problems. (Tabs as well, by the way... it's mixing tabs and spaces that is a problem.)

Net neutrality...

"Why do we still use SQL" and "Why do we still use relational databases" are two very different questions. They seem like much the same thing, because SQL is pretty much the only query language offered by relational database systems nowadays... so if you use SQL, you use an RDBMS, and vice versa. But other query languages used to exist. There was QUEL [1], for example. It seems to have fallen by the wayside; most people have probably never heard of it. I guess there is very little room for multiple languages in this particular space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages

Yes, but according to the article, Mastodon only has 35K users at the moment. The question is how they're going to enforce this policy when/if it reaches Twitter size (hundreds of millions of users). When armies of trolls show up making hit-and-run accounts, that's going to be hard to combat.

Then again, Twitter has been notoriously uninterested in fighting this kind of problem. In fact, they don't seem to care much at all what their users think (editing tweets, anyone?), probably because users are not a direct source of income for them (but advertisers are). This is different in the case of Mastodon. It would be interesting to see what kind of solution they might come up with.

"We" are not using it for the same reason nazis are not using it: because hardly anyone's there. It needs critical mass first. Once that happens, nazis/trolls/etc will find their way there too, I'm afraid.

In spite of what the article claims, the vast majority of employers do NOT let you work remotely 100% of the time. They are mostly located in the big/expensive cities, so that's where developers will go. There's really no mystery there.

Same here... I then moved to Bloglines, which was also closed down eventually. (Or maybe it was the other way around? Not sure which one closed down first.) I now use feed.ly, but I really don't read blogs as much as I used to.

You are correct. The problem here seems to be that the OP's tests depend on implementation details, which of course shouldn't happen. Presumably this wouldn't occur in a language where you could hide these implementation details (private attributes/methods, etc). That said, Python doesn't force you or encourage you to write your tests like this. Just because it's possible to access the implementation, doesn't mean you should.

That reminds me a bit of PILOT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PILOT

"""There is no rise. Not any more. At best, it's a plateau, and in my opinion, all dynamically typed languages except Javascript are on a straight decline curve, slowly being replaced by statically typed languages."""

This sounds like wishful thinking. (Your wish, apparently... certainly not mine. :-) I have seen no evidence that Python is on the way out. If I look at the languages asked for in HN's "Who's Hiring" thread, Python is #1. Even so, there are dynamically typed functional languages, like Clojure and Elixir, that are definitely on the way up.

Good god. If anything is "forced" upon high-school kids, it's algebra. (Maybe ask the average high schooler and see what they have to say about it.) I haven't heard of any schools that make Python mandatory though; where are these located?

You say that like it's a bad thing. Python is a multi-paradigm language, allowing you to pick (or create) the idiom that is best suited for solving the problem at hand. It is not a straitjacket language that tells you how to think.

The use of "=" for assignment is only confusing if you are already used to using for equations, and even then it's only confusing for a very short time, since it's obvious that the two (assignment vs equations) are completely different things. Python is hardly the first language to use it, by the way; I got started with BASIC on a Commodore 16 which used X=X+1, before I even knew about equations.