Types, scope, languages and all that

I have been writing and reading python for a good while at this point.

After a time, with a language, you learn idioms that allow you to do more with less.

Lists and dictionaries, strings and sets.

The rest is just deciding how to name the keys that get you to the values of the key.

So the problem turns into how to handle the keys, the meta-data, as man and machine try together to infer meaning.

Now we have learnt that our computers, lack an ounce of nuance, or if they do and it works until it, rather spectacularly, doesn’t.

So everything has types, as what could you possibly know without types?

I have rarely known exactly what I might be passing around, but I can fill in the details later, if it turns out I care enough.

But we can start by passing a ball around, and each have a turn to see how it spins.

Types in python

I have been using it so long that I have learned to take advantage of the lack of types.

It reduces the cost of changes over time, there’s less to change when it changes.

There is less to read.

And when you need more precision at speed, someone has already done it.

And there is lots of work that is no longer needed, because we all have a cray in our pocket.

Except that we’ve all got so much data with a Cray in our pockets.