As everything in Python is an object, classes are created by instanciating a super class called a metaclass. Metaprogramming is about overriding some behavior of that metaclass. This is often used to follow the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in order to avoid repeating the same or similar code inside a program. Metaprogramming is thus often used by frameworks such as Django as it helps to make their API much easier to use.
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Collections
Python, like languages, contains several built-in collections. Let’s review the various types of collection and how can you also create your own collections.
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Object comparison
There are things that vary greatly from language to language. After variable scope, let’s look at object comparison. That is, how are objects compared to each other? How are they evaluated as a condition?
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Performance and Moore’s Law
A non-technical post today, as a reflection about the consequences of what we have studied aspects of Python such as dynamic-typing, immutability or the garbage collector – and their impact on performance.
Dynamic typing (part 2)
In the first part we looked at some of the consequences of Python being a dynamically-typed language. Let’s have a look at another implications such as the concept of class, how things work under the hood as well as performance.
Dynamic typing (part 1)
Python is a dynamically-typed language, just like PHP, JavaScript or Ruby, and contrary to statically-typed languages such as C/C++, Java or Scala.
In a dynamically-typed language, the code can never know in advance what will be the type of any variable. You can define a function to perform a particular operation on, say, a collection, but unless you explicitly filter out an argument that is not a collection, the code is never certain that it is indeed one – and the bytecode compiler sure cannot be certain either.
Using dynamic types has consequences for the language – both from a conceptual standpoint and from an implementation standpoint.
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Everything’s an object
In Python, pretty much everything is an object, whether it is a number, a function… or even None.
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