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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Often I use Python for exploratory purposes. Like, I got a bunch of data, and I want to know if a particular algorithm might work or not. I implement the algorithm, but realize the results don’t look good enough. So I tweak the algorithm, maybe even do major refactoring. Or maybe I realize my visualizations or metrics don’t capture what I need to see. Or maybe I must settle for some compromise?

    I iterate on this repeatedly until I find something I’m happy about (or until I give up). Sometimes I end up with something completely different from my initial idea.

    TDD won’t help me much here because the end result is unknown. For each iteration of this idea process I might even need to rewrite all the tests because none of them are valid anymore.

















  • One benefit of using dropwhile is that (with a bit of practice) it can actually be easier to read than a for loop. All for loops look similar. You need to read the for loop line by line to understand what it really do.

    With dropwhile (or map, filter and reduce), it’s immediately obvious it will drop all elements until a certain condition turns false.