The Pythonista app for iPad

Let me start my review with "wow!"

Python 3.6 on the iPad. Works. Nicely. Easy to use. Reliable. Rock-Solid.

I'm not switching to iPad as my primary platform any time in the near future.  But. For certain kinds of small and tightly focused hackery, this is really nice.

I use a bracket to hold the iPad up and an external keyboard. I can be used with the on-screen keyboard, but, that's slow-going for me.

Here's the thing that was exquisitely simple in Pythonista:

I'm able to draw a hex grid ("Flat Top", "Double Height") in a few dozen lines of code. This includes a bunch of geometry rules like adjacency and directional movement.

The Pythonista package includes a super-easy-to-use canvas module that's a tiny bit simpler than turtle graphics. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it has enough graphics primitives to make it easy to create hexagons and tile the surface.

Given a HexGrid instance, I can then create "cities" and their surrounding territories in an "empire". I've tried a few organic growth algorithms, and I like the look of these maps. They provide a lot of avenues for conflict for writing fiction or playing role-playing games.

Some of the algorithmic foundations: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/.

Fun Hackery

This is fun hackery because I can change the code, click the run icon, and watch the consequence of the changes. A traceback is highlighted in the original file. Easy. Fun.

It's pretty slow. No surprise there. It's running on an iPad.

It's pretty easy to work on. Whip out the iPad and start coding.

The super-easy, built-in canvas module means feedback is instant and gratifying.

I can see having an intro to programming class where the fee includes an extra $800 for the iPad you take home along with your new-found skills in basic coding. (This is still a *lot* of money, but it's less than a full laptop.)

Filling in the Holes

Looking at the output, you can see the growth algorithm left some unfilled holes. A later version examines all unfilled spaces to see if they're entirely surrounded by one color and fills them. This is a fun algorithm because it works in a simple way with the adjacency iterator and the set of locations covered by a city. Locations 12L and 17K are these "Simply Surrounded Single Holes."

However, there are still some "Edge" cases that are challenging.

Location 12D reflects a hole on a border. These are interesting, and could be the seed for epic wargaming, role-playing game, novel-writing drama. A simple algorithm can find these and assign a random owner... But... They really need a special "On Fire" color scheme to show the potential for drama.

There's a subtlety in the upper-left corner (5W and 6V) between Blue and Green. While these seem like simple border holes, each hole as only five of six required neighbors.

Compare these with 16P in the upper-right corner. This also has five of six neighbors. However, this space looks like it could be a bay leading up to a river and the river is a natural border between nations.

The head of the bay at 16P has 5 neighbors of two colors, similar to 5W and 6V. The difference can be detected by a recursive walk to see if a hole is connected to other holes and the composite is actually surrounded. There are lots of *edge* cases, but the (5W, 6V) pair seems to embody the next stage of surround detection.

This more nuanced algorithm design doesn't work out well in the Pythonista environment. This algorithm design requires careful unit tests, not the code-and-run cycle of hackery. For this kind of careful design, we'd need to leverage doctest (or unittest) for testing. While I'd like pytest, that's a lot to ask for. For these kinds of apps, doctest is more than adequate, and a simple import doctest; doctest.testmod() in a scrip can help be sure things work as expected.

tl;dr

If you're an iPad user, consider adding Pythonista. You can really write real Python. It's a useful environment. It's fun for teaching.

Lynda and Educational Content

Just found http://www.lynda.com.

Unlike random YouTube videos, these are professionally edited.

Not everything on YouTube is poorly edited. Some are really good.

Having done a few webcasts for O'Reilly (and I have another scheduled for January 2016,) I know that my "you knows" -- you know -- and my "umms" are -- umm -- annoying.

I know professionals -- actors, pastors, lawyers -- who can extemporize really well. And it raises the bar a lot.

But the idea of having an editor clean up the "you knows" is appealing.

Coding Camp vs. Computer Science

Step 1, read this: "Dear GeekWire: A coding bootcamp is not a replacement for a computer science degree".   It's short, it won't hurt.

I got this comment.

"The world runs in legacy code and the cs degrees focus on leading edge 

Most of what is learned in cs [is] never used in the mainstream of business 

Much of computer work is repetitive and uninviting to upwardly mobile people who generally are moving up not improving the breed"

I disagree.  A lot.

"The world runs in legacy code." First, this is reductionist: everything that's been pushed to GitHub is now a "legacy". 

• Does "legacy" mean "old, bad code?" If so, only CS grads will be equipped to make that judgement. 
• Does "legacy" mean "COBOL?" If so, only CS grads will be able to articulate the problems with COBOL and make a rational plan to replace it with Microservices. 
• Does "legacy" mean "not very interesting?" We'll return to this.

"CS degrees focus on leading edge." Not really true at all. The foundations of CS: data structures and algorithms, logic, and computability, haven't changed much since the days of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. They're highly relevant and form the core of a sensible curriculum.  

The "leading edge" would be some Java 1.8 nonsense or some Angular JS hokum. The kind of thing that comes and goes. The point of CS education is to make languages and language features just another thing, not something special and unique. A little CS background allows a programmer to lump all SQL databases into a broad category and deal with them sensibly. A Code Camp grad who only knows SQLite may have trouble seeing that Oracle is superficially different but fundamentally similar.

"cs is never used in the mainstream of business." True for some businesses. This is completely true for those businesses where "legacy" means "not very interesting." 

There is a great deal of not very interesting legacy code that fails to leverage a data structure more advanced than the flat file. This code is a liability, not an asset. The managers that let this happen probably didn't have a strong CS background and hired Code Camp graduates (because they're inexpensive) and created a huge pile of very bad code.

I've met these people and worked at these companies. It's a bad thing. The "leadership" that created such a huge pile of wasteful code needs to be fired. The "all that bad coded evolved during the 70's and 80's" isn't a very good excuse. A large amount of not interesting code can be replaced with a small amount of interesting code quickly and with almost zero risk.

Any company that's unable to pursue new lines of business because -- you know -- we've always done X and it's expensive to pivot to Y is deranged. They're merely holding onto their niche because they're paralyzed by fear of innovation=failure.

"Much of computer work is repetitive".  False. It's made repetitive by unimaginative management types who like to manage repetitive work. If you've done it twice, you need to be prepared to distinguish coincidence from pattern. When you've done it three times, that's a pattern, and you need to automate it. If you do it a fourth time, you're missing the opportunity to automate, wasting money instead of investing it.

"Much of computer work is ... uninviting to upwardly mobile people" Only in places where repetitive is permitted to exist.  If repetitive is not permitted, upward mobility will be the norm for the innovators.

"people who generally are moving up not improving the breed". I get this. The smart people move on. All we have left in this company are Code Camp graduates and their managers who value repetitive work and large volumes of not interesting code. 

Improving the Breed means what? 

Hiring CS graduates instead of Code Camp kiddies.

Events: PyCon 2016, OSCon 2016

Many years ago ('07?) I went to my first PyCon. My situation changed and I didn't get to another PyCon until last year.

The story is a kind of major dumbosity. In '07 I could expense the trip as education. In '08, I'd lost that feature of my employment. After that I was actively figuring out how to be self-employed as a writer and technomad, and completely took my eye off the various kinds of tax deductions and sponsorship opportunities that I might have leveraged. It was too complex, arbitrary, and bewildering for me.

PyCon is an energizing event.  I can't say enough good things about attending session after session on Python and the Python-related ecosystem. In particular, it's a joy to see people pitching their solutions to complex problems.

Here's a reminder: https://us.pycon.org/2016/

Since I do some work for O'Reilly media -- if a pair of webcasts count as work -- I think I want to see if I can finagle my way into OSCon, also.

Here's the reminder: http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/open-source

I think I can leverage some material from Functional Python Programming to create an interesting tutorial.  My webcast on the five kinds of Python functions can expand into a bunch of hands-on-keyboard exercises to build examples of each kind of callable thingy. 

Proposals are in. Waiting for comments. Fingers crossed.

Why Computer Science for All is good for all

An Open Letter from the Nation’s Tech and Business Leaders: Why Computer Science for All is good for all.

"These are the skills and competencies that will power the growth of every industry..."

Civic leaders and educators need to be in on this. And professionals who have skills to share need to be in on this also. It's not limited to New York City. It's a nationwide (perhaps world-wide) need for skills. There are a lot of talented people. Some of them haven't had the right sequence of opportunities to realize their talents.