Neat trick: invoking a Python debugger at an arbitrary point in your program

Do you find yourself occasionally wishing you could freeze a misbehaving program at an arbitrary point in time and then examining what was going on interactively?

That's exactly what the debugger is for, but sometimes it's just too much of a bother to run your program inside it, you have to set breakpoints, etc.

Well there's a really simple alternative: call the debugger from an arbitrary point in your program, like this...

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Python performance tests reaffirms "premature optimization is the root of all evil"

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

Today while programming I found myself thinking about the performance impact of various basic Python operations such as method invocation, the "in" operator, etc.

This is a mistake because you really shouldn't be thinking about this stuff while programming. The performance impact of doing things one way vs another way is usually so small that you couldn't measure it.

Practical guidelines for beautiful Python code

Every now and then Liraz and I find ourselves chatting about how much we love Python, but more so the lessons we have learned from coding, and how to apply them to create beautiful Python code. I've tried to refine some of the "lessons" into practical guidelines that I apply religiously to all new code I write, and the refactoring of old code I written.

To Lisp or not to Lisp, that is the question.

Musings on Lisp by a routinely Pythonic programmer

Last week I did some maintenance on various Python projects I haven't touched in years (literally), and I was surprised by how easy, almost trivial it was to reorient myself and make the necessary changes.

That observation came at the right time because I've been reading up on Lisp dialects for a while now and questioning whether or not I should be programming in Lisp instead. Lisp enthusiasts (converts?) certainly make persuasive arguments, typically advocating Lisp as the one-true-language with near religious zeal.

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