Volume 13: Eagerly Evaluated Questions, with Joseph Jevnik
Greetings, friends! Last week our engagement took a bit of a nose dive, with opens and clicks dropping a bunch. This is surprising since metrics for hifi have always been well above industry average, and pretty damn good, if I do say so. For transparency’s sake, the average open rate over 12 volumes has been 58%, with an average click through rate of 30%. The minimum (last week) CTR is 22.26%, and maximum (38.92%). In terms of opens, last week was the low at 45.26%, with a whopping 67.33% topping us off. And as of this writing there are 275 subscribers!
So what was it about last week? Please let me know! Hit the reply thingy in whatever mail client you’re using these days!
Now. On to the real business. This week I’ve devoted the list of hacks to the famed $20,000 Pyramid category “Things that relate to compilation.” The reason for this is that it sort of fits a theme with the AMMMMAAAAZING featured interview we have in store. A while back, friend of hifi (and Hack && Tell) Thomas Ballinger replied to my request for feedback and suggested I interview Joseph Jevnik, who has a little project to make Python lazily evaluated. Joseph was super excited to chat me up about it, and not only did I learn a lot about implementing lazy evaluation, it reinvigorated me to think about passion projects again!
The interview is long, so rather than print it in full here, we’ll link it later with an excerpt. I promise, you don’t want to miss it! And, be sure to share it!
The hack (short-)list.
plasma – joelpx
The project formally known as reverse, is an interactive disassembler for x86/ARM/MIPS. Generates indented pseudo-code with colored syntax code.
fython – Nicolas Essis-Breton
Fortran, with a Python like syntax.
bone-lisp – Wolfgang Jaehrling
bone-lisp looks like a regular Lisp-1 (a la Scheme), but has some interesting implementation features such as its use of regions instead of garbage collection.
TrumpScript – Sam Shadwell
Makes Python Great Again.
Other articles you could read, but you should probably wait until after you’ve read the interview!
Without further ado…
Like I said in my long and winded introduction, I’m printing just an excerpt from the interview in the email due to it’s length. If you’d like to just simply skip ahead and read it all, please do.
Andrew: So first, I have to get it out of the way. Your GitHub username is
llllllllll. Can you tell us the story behind that?
Joseph: When I made my GitHub account I was playing a lot of StarCraft II. In that game, userames are not unique, so many players decided to name themselves with a “barcode” to be anonymous. This would make it harder for people to know what strategies you were practicing or stream snipe you. I chose to use this name on GitHub because I thought it was fun. I have found it to be quite polarizing; some people think it is funny and some people think it is really annoying. I have been asked to change it a couple of times but I think it is too much fun. I also like that the name that meant “anonymous” seems to draw a lot of attention.
A: My guess is that a number of readers haven’t been exposed to lazy evaluation. What is lazy evaluation, and why does adding it to Python make sense?
J: Lazy evaluation, also known as “call by need”, is an evaluation strategy where values are produced when only needed. This is the opposite of eager evaluation, what Python normally does, where functions are executed as seen and values are produced immediately. Python has some built in tools for lazily evaluating code. One of the more explicit ways is with a generator. Generators only produce values as requested as opposed to a list or tuple which eagerly evaluates all of the members. Another way people get lazy evaluation in Python is with closures. …
Click here to read the full, unshortened interview! Go! You won’t regret it.
See you later space cowboy…
Until next time!
Happy hacking,
Andrew