Being born before Roe vs. Wade made abortions legal in 1973. — As a child growing up in the 1970s, my mother told me frequently that she would have aborted me if abortion was legal in 1969. Four years before Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal throughout the United States. My parents got friendly during Thanksgiving weekend in 1968. After the New…

Using @singledispatch and @singledispatchmethod interchangeably for static methods inside a class. — While writing a chess program in Python as a learning exercise, I had two separate functions for converting a position from an algebraic notation string, 'a1', to a tuple, (97, 1), and vice versa. I later merged the two functions into a static method for the Board class. class Board(): …

A quick-and-dirty fix for an incomprehensible error message. — I’m writing a chess program in Python as a learning exercising. Not surprisingly, mypy, the static type checker, complained about my code with yet another incomprehensible error message. Here’s a quick-and-dirty fix for the incompatible type assignment error. I have a if-else statement that assigns a pair of integers or…

When a neat trick in Python becomes a side effect. — When cleaning up the code for my chess program that I’m writing in Python as a learning exercise, I fixed a problem by introducing another problem. class Rank(list, Enum): HIGH = [1, 8] PAWN = [2, 7] I created a multiple-inheritance class with list and Enum that allowed access to…

Not all strings are the same when assigning to a variable. — While cleaning up code in a chess program that I’m writing in Python as a learning exercise, I came across yet another problem with the mypy static type checker. This time with theEnum.name attribute. My original statement assigned either “White” or “Black” from Enum.name …

A neat trick to have dict.get() return something that isn’t callable. The mypy static type checker always complain about using a dictionary to call functions. Especially this code segment from a chess program that I’m writing in Python as a learning exercise. status = {Bishop: self.validate_move_bishop…

When fixing one problem creates another problem in Python. — While cleaning up my code for a chess program that I’m writing in Python as a learning exercise, I created an Enum class to represent the starting ranks for certain pieces on the board. class Rank(Enum): HIGH = [1, 8] PAWN = [2, 7] Ranks 1 and 8 are where…

Four ways to refactor code for determining even numbers. — Johnny B. Getgoode tweeted a screenshot from his developer Discourse server on February 13, 2022. Experienced programmers cringed at the repeating lines of if else to determine if a number is even or odd. That prompted a lively discussion on how to “un-cringe” this function. Here are four ways to…

Videos seen around the world are age restricted on YouTube. — YouTube sent me a late night email on Wednesday, August 4, 2021, informing me that a video on my channel was no longer compliant with the Community Guidelines and age restricted (a viewer must be 18 years or older and logged in to view the video). That was odd. I…