Fri 17 August 2018

The Zen of Python, Explained

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

The Zen of Python by Tim Peters are 20 guidelines for the design of the Python language. Your Python code doesn’t necessarily have to follow these guidelines, but they’re good to keep in mind. The Zen of Python is an Easter egg, or hidden joke, that appears if you run import this.

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Mon 21 May 2018

Python's Fake Increment and Decrement Operators

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

In Python, you can increase the value of a variable by 1 or reduce it by 1 using the augmented assignment operators. The code spam += 1 and spam -= 1 increments and decrements the numeric values in spam by 1, respectively.

Other languages such as C++ and Java have the ++ and -- operators for incrementing and decrementing variables. (The name of C++ itself reflects this; the name is a tongue-in-cheek joke that indicates it's an enhanced form of the C language.) Code in C++ and Java could have ++spam or spam++. Python wisely doesn't include these operators; they are notoriously susceptible to subtle bugs.

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Fri 02 February 2018

How To Ask For Programming Help

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

I often get emails say little more than "Why doesn't my program work?" Often I can't answer them; either I don't have enough information about your problem or you're asking me about something I don't know anything about.

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