End Sleepy Lectures

February 19, 2014

Chapter 1. Refactoring, a First Example

The traditional way to begin talking about something is to outline the history, broad principles, and the like. When someone does that at a conference, I get slightly sleepy. My mind starts wandering with a low-priority background process that polls the speaker until he or she gives an example.

All Excerpts From

Roberts, Don. "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code." Addison-Wesley Professional, 1999. iBooks.
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You don't need to inform me of my ability to use a search engine…

February 12, 2014

Running the Test Driver

See the Python library manual, the PyPI website, and your favorite Web search engine for additional testing toolkits in both Python itself and the third-party domain.

All Excerpts From

Lutz, Mark. "Programming Python." O'Reilly Media, 2010-12-14. iBooks.
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Pizza Python

February 11, 2014

OOP and Inheritance: "Is-a" Relationships

Being engineers at heart, we've decided to build a robot to make the pizzas; but being politically and cybernetically correct, we've also decided to make our robot a full-fledged employee with a salary.

All Excerpts From

Lutz, Mark. "Learning Python." O'Reilly Media, 2009-09-16. iBooks.
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CoffeeScript's Pragmatic Philosophy

February 1, 2014

It's Just JavaScript

For example, it would be nice if list[-1] in CoffeeScript could return the last item in the list. At first glance, it seems simple enough to implement, and would be useful. Unfortunately, any expression may be used to index into an array, so with negative array indices you would have to add a special check to every list[x] operation to ask if x is a positive number or a negative one. This would take CoffeeScript away from JavaScript semantics, and more importantly, JavaScript levels of performance—the array accesses in your inner loops would slow down considerably. For this reason, CoffeeScript doesn't add negative array indices to the language.

All Excerpts From

MacCaw, Alex. "The Little Book on CoffeeScript." O'Reilly Media, 2012-01-19. iBooks.
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