Allanderek's blog

Since almost as long as compilers have been around there have been attempts to store source code as something other than plain text.

There was a thread on the Elm discourse regarding the communcation of expectations when contributing to Elm.

In Elm comma separated lists (and records and tuples) are traditionally written with the comma on the next line preceding the next item like: elements : List (Html msg) elements = [ title , introduction , mainImage , mainContent , conc…

I’ve always indented Elm with four spaces.

This morning someone posted their snake game implementation to the Elm discourse asking for feedback on their implemenation.

In Elm it’s possible to import a name from a module in two ways, you can either import the module and expose the name, or import the module, perhaps aliasing the module name, and then qualify the use of the target entity.

Elm has followed many other languages in equating a file to some form of encapsulation unit, in the case of Elm this is a module, much like it is in Haskell, Java used a class.

We have an application that uses a login token which expires.

Elm is famously pretty conservative when it comes to adding language features/syntax.

Defensive programming is generally defined using terms such as ‘impossible’, one definition on the c2 wiki has Defend against the impossible because the impossible will happen.

Elm has extensible records, you can write a type like { a | x : Int } which means a record type that has at least a field named x of type Int but may have other fields as well.

Alex Korban has released another version of his Elm Catalog.

I’m going to talk about the common-language-runtime, and use this to contrast Purescript and Elm.

The builder pattern seems to be prettty popular in Elm, here is an elm-radio episode dedicated to it.

Musings on my extremely mild preference for snake-case over camel-case

I have been reading through some of the source code from the requests library.

I wanted to compare the manifestos for the local elections so I did a quick search but it came up with nothing.

Bill the lizard has an excellent post describing an interesting puzzle as to the most desirable full house in a game of poker.

Developing a small web application I recently had reason to upgrade from Python 3.4 to Python 3.6.

I have written before about Flask and obtaining test coverage results here and with an update here.

I come from a functional programming background, so I a lot of love for functions and so-called anonymous functions or lambdas.

Looking through the code of an open-source Python project I came across code that amounts to the following: host_name = self.connection.getsockname()[0] if self.server.host_name is not None: host_name = self.server.host_name This looks odd

More than a decade and a half ago, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote a blog post isinstance() considered harmful, a lot of which I believe holds up pretty well today.

Introduction Typically routes in a web application that require login are explicitly marked as such.

I have a small niggle that comes up in my Python programming.

In many cases whilst programming there is a decision to be made as to whether to store some state, or (re)caluate it as and when needed.

Dougal Matthews has written a blog post detailing how Vulture can be used to find some dead code.

Introduction I do not aim to answer the question in the title more raise the question.

Selenium is a great way to test web applications and it has Python bindings.

Method Cascading Vasudev Ram has a thoughful post about method chaining/cascading that I picked up from planet python in which he basically argues for the use of method cascading.

Test First and Mutation Testing I’m going to argue that mutation testing has a strong use in a test first development environment and I’ll conclude by proposing a mechanism to link mutation testing to the source code control mechanism to further aid test…

Placement of Python Import Statements Pep 8 specifies that all import statements should be “put at the top of the file, just after any module comments and docstrings, and before module globals and constants.”

Update: Flask+Coverage Analysis In a previous post I demonstrated how to get coverage analysis working for a Flask web application in a relatively simple manner.

Flask + Coverage Analysis This post demonstrates a simple web application written in Flask with coverage analysis for the tests.

Suppose you have a web service using a Python web framework such as Flask.