Python comes with several built-in decorators. The most important are: @classmethod @staticmethod @property In a nutshell: A static method can be called on either an instance of the class or the class directly but cannot access any class member. A class method is basically the same but it can also access properties of the class.…
Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) is a programming idiom that describes how resource acquisition and deallocation should be tied to object lifetime. Wikipedia demonstrates how the C++ standard library implements this idiom using the types std::lock_guard<> and std::ofstream as examples. But is it really necessary to implement this idiom in every type you create? Can’t…
Motivation When writing Python packages you often have to assure that the packages can be used on different platforms and Python versions e.g. the package must work under Python 3.8 on Linux as well as with Python 3.9 on Windows. But how do you test all those supported OS and version combinations? Enter tox History…
Motivation Sometimes a task which should be easy can be hard to accomplish in practice. Manipulating nested dictionaries in Python seems to be such a task. Without dotty Accessing nested dictionaries looks like this: data = { ‘a’: { ‘b’: { ‘c’: ‘d’ } } } assert data[‘a’][‘b’][‘c’] == ‘d’ You have to chain the…
A horrifying amount of business is still driven by Microsoft Excel. Need some stats? Excel. Need some number crunching? Excel Most of the time you can work with formulas in your sheet and you will be fine. But sometimes you need more power: Time to level up your VBA skills History VBA stands for “Visual…
Sometimes it’s nice to know where you are. import java.nio.file.Paths fun main() { val cwd = Paths.get(“”).toAbsolutePath() println(cwd.toString()) }
Before Kotlin BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(“data.txt”)); try { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); String line = br.readLine(); while (line != null) { sb.append(line); sb.append(System.lineSeparator()); line = br.readLine(); } String content = sb.toString(); } finally { br.close(); } This is a code sample reading a files content in plain old Java. What a mess…
Motivation Whether you need credentials to log into a system or some configuration parameters for your application, the .env concept might help you. Installation pip install python-dotenv Usage .env file Create an .env file in your project root folder You should not share this file or commit/push it to your version control. You should add…
Dependency First you need to add the following dependency to your build.gradle file dependencies { testImplementation ‘org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-test’ As a second step you need to add the task test { useJUnitPlatform() } Implementation When you are familiar with JUnit you may recognized the @Test annotation. Assertions work pretty much the same. You can choose from a…
Motivation Learning a programming language can be challenging. Although there are tons of articles and tutorials for learning languages the most important thing is to transfer your knowledge to other real world problems. The challenges The coding challenges are language agnostic so you can use any modern language which supports writing command line applications. Write…