Quotes About Coding

The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language

Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.

Pandemics generally develop only when a radical change in the hemagglutinin, or the neuraminidase, or both, occurs. When an entirely new gene coding for one or both replaces the old one, the shape of the new antigen bears little resemblance to the old one. This is called "antigen shift.

Testing proves a programmer's failure. Debugging is the programmer's vindication.

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code.

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

even buying a user's manual—The Female Orgasm—and learned to his dismay that writing twenty-five thousand lines of code was cake compared to bringing a full-grown female to orgasm.

when in Pythonland, do as Pythonistas do, not as C programmers do.

This description requires elaboration when the value and the slice being assigned overlap: L[2:5]=L[3:6], for instance, works fine because the value to be inserted is fetched before the deletion happens on the left.

__next__ raises a built-in StopIteration exception at end-of-file

you can do everything in Python that you can in Perl, but

On the other hand, you might decide to use operator overloading if you need to pass a user-defined object to a function that was coded to expect the operators available on a built-in type like a list or a dictionary.

operator overloading — coding methods in a class that intercept and process built-in operations when run on the class's instances.

Inheritance is best at coding extensions based on direct customization (like our Manager specialization of Person). Composition is well suited to scenarios where multiple objects are aggregated into a whole and directed by a controller layer class. Inheritance passes calls up to reuse, and composition passes down to delegate.

Technically, __str__ is preferred by print and str, and __repr__ is used as a fallback for these roles and in all other contexts.

In Python, practicality often beats aesthetics.

Of course, as I've pointed out numerous times in this book, type checking is usually the wrong thing to do in Python programs (we code to object interfaces, not object types), and the more general isinstance built-in is more likely what you'll want to use in the rare cases where instance class types must be queried.

By coding functions and classes in module files, we've ensured that they naturally support reuse. And by coding our software as classes, we've ensured that it naturally supports extension.

and indent all but the simplest of blocks.

In general terms, the loop else simply provides explicit syntax for a common coding scenario — it is a coding structure that lets us catch the "other" way out of a loop, without setting and checking flags or conditions.

remember that generator functions simply return objects with methods that handle next operations run by for loops at each level, and don't produce any results until iterated; and

The more important point here is that this Manager alternative is representative of a general coding pattern usually known as delegation — a composite-based structure that manages a wrapped object and propagates method calls to it.