Improving your programming style in Python
Some references on software development techniques and patterns to help write better code.
software engineering posts
Software design for maintainability
I have just spent the best part of my Sunday fixing a bug that turned out being a seemingly-trivial two-liner. Such unpleasant experiences are all too frequent, and weight a lot on my view of code design.
My stance on code design
I call code design the process of designing …
Simple object signatures
A signature pattern
There are many libraries around to specify what I call a ‘signature’ for an object, in other words a list of attributes that define its parameter set. I have heavily used Enthought’s Traits library for this purpose, but the concept is fairly general and can be …
Writing parallel code in a readable way
Although I often have embarrasingly parallel problems (data parallel), and I have an 8-CPU box at work, I used to frown on writing parallel computing code when doing exploratory coding. We now have fantastic parallel computing facilities in Python (amongst other, multiprocessing, IPython, and parallel Python). However, in my opinion …
Useful trick for functions and tests using np.random
How to test functions that use the numpy random number generator
Object-oriented design: framework objects versus data containers
I find that in object oriented design, there are two kinds of objects:
- A first kind is the object encoding logics. This is an object for which clever and complex design will hold together the logics of a state-full application. It can often be part of a forest of objects …
Pycon FR: presentations and tutorials
May 30th and 31st the French Python conference, Pycon FR, will be held at ‘la citée des sciences’, la Villette, in Paris.
The first day, I will be giving a one-hour-long tutorial (in French) on numpy, scipy, and all the Python for Science jazz. On the following day, I will …
Tracking objects in scientific code
When I started working in my new field (data analysis of functional brain images), I was surprised to find in our data-analysis scripts what I thought was a very particular code smell: the numerical code is always doing a lot of filename and path manipulation, loading and saving data even …
Objects, modules and Traits and Envisage
I have been reading an article about a new language paradigm (Erasmus, a modular language for concurrent programming). The authors discuss the limitations of objects in terms of modularity. To sum up their point (and most probably distort it completely), the limitations with objects comes from the fact that you …