Check out this list of questions on Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bpython%5D+whitespace+syntax

About 10% of these are really just complaints about Python's syntax. Almost every Stack Overflow question on Python's use of syntactic whitespace is really just a complaint.

Here's today's example: "Python without …

See the previous sections, starting with the first on finding an ancient CGI script.

We don't need an OpenAPI specification. But, it is so helpful to formalize the behavior of a web site that it's hard for me to imagine working without it.

In this case, the legacy script only …

Be sure to see the original script and the test cases in the prior posts.

We need to understand a little about what a web request is. This can help us do the refactoring.

It can help to think of a web server a function that maps a request to …

See "We have an ancient Python2 CGI script -- what do we do?" The previous post in this series provides an overview of the process of getting rid of legacy code.

Here's some code. I know it's painfully long; the point is to provide a super-specific, very concrete example of what …

This was a shocking email: the people have a Python 2 CGI script. They needed advice on Python 2 to 3 migration.

Here's my advice on a Python 2 CGI script: Throw It Away.

A great deal of the CGI processing is part of the wsgi module, as well as …

I need to rewrite Stingray Reader. This project handles a certain amount of file processing using a schema to assure the Logical Layout is understood. It handles several common Physical Formats:

• CSV files where the format is extended by the various dialects options.
• COBOL files in ASCII or EBCDIC.

The …

I don't get many of these "I have code that doesn't work" requests. But I do see them once in a great while.

It might be something like the following two-part explanation with a following question.

I have this code

from base64 import b64encode
def some_func(message):
    msg = b64encode(message …

See 9 Reasons Why Python Is Weird For C++ Developers.

I'm often bothered by inter-language comparisons. Mostly because programming languages -- except in the most abstract way -- aren't really very comparable. At the Turing Machine level the finite state automata are comparable, but that reductionist view (intentionally) eliminates all the expressive …

Fascinating. The reference to the classic Mac OS with non-preemptive multi-tasking is quite cool. The concept fits nicely with Python's async/await coroutines that need to collaborate with a periodic OS request to permit interaction with streams of events from another source (i.e., a foreground window.)

Writing Interactive Compute-Intensive …

What do I know about "inspiration" at work? I'm not sure I know much, but I think I may have some advice that could be useful.

I was in the high-tech write-software-every-day workplace since about 1976 or so. (The first two years were part-time while in college.) I use past …