PowerShell is an interactive shell and scripting language from Microsoft. It’s object-oriented — and that’s not just a buzzword, that’s a big difference to how the standard Unix shells work. And it is actually usable as an interactive shell.
A year ago, I wrote about the sad state of Python packaging. The large number of tools in the space, the emphasis on writing vague standards instead of rallying around the One True Tool, and the complicated venv-based ecosystem instead of a solution similar to node_modules. What has changed in the past year? Has anything improved, is everything the same, or are things worse than they were before?
There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are confused about virtual environments. But does it have to be this way? Are the current solutions to packaging problems any good? And is the organization behind most of the packaging tools and standards part of the problem itself?
Join me on a journey through packaging in Python and elsewhere. We’ll start by describing the classic packaging stack (involving setuptools and friends), the scientific stack (with conda), and some of the modern/alternate tools, such as Pipenv, Poetry, Hatch, or PDM. We’ll also look at some examples of packaging and dependency-related workflows seen elsewhere (Node.js and .NET). We’ll also take a glimpse at a possible future (with a venv-less workflow with PDM), and see if the PyPA agrees with the vision and insights of eight thousand users.
I recently wrote a simple console app in C#. This post tells you more about the language, the .NET ecosystem, and why you should write your next app in it.
You installed Windows on an Intel Mac via Boot Camp, and want to use virtualization in it. But there’s an issue — hardware virtualization extensions are not available. Luckily, this can be worked around easily with the help of rEFInd, an alternate boot manager.
The rumor mill was right this time, and Apple has just announced they will transition Macs to ARM processors. These news have some side effects for software developers, particularly those not working with the Apple ecosystem. And they also affect people who depend on both macOS and Windows.
Recently, I reinstalled macOS on my device. Throughout the process, many attempts failed miserably. But I now have some experience and assorted hints on what to try (as long as you’ve got an Intel Mac).
HTML 5.0 was finalized in 2014 (and its drafts were published even earlier), and with it came the <datalist> element. It’s
2020, and even though it might look like a good replacement for custom
autocomplete widgets, browser issues made me get rid of it.
This humble blog is written by an old-school developer who sometimes does web stuff. An attempt to customize the Bootstrap CSS theme requires 50 MB of node_modules, over 500 packages, and comes with a bit of frustration at stupid tools and terrible documentation.
Today’s blog post is going to contain fairly advanced Python hackery. We’ll
take two functions — one is a wrapper for the other, but also adds some
positional arguments. And we’ll change the signature displayed everywhere from
the uninformative f(new_arg, *args, **kwargs) to something more
appropriate.