Tag Archives: Python

How to produce a JSON tree with nested data from Scrapy

This was an interesting puzzle: creating one single well formed JSON from a hierarchy of web pages. E.g., the sporting goods hierarchy of an e-commerce site could be Categories, Brands, Products. And so you’d like to output JSON like this: [Etc.] As an aside, I like architecting my systems to generate this kind of output…More

Making mistakes: Django startproject and Rails new

I like to see how software reacts when I step off the happy path and make a mistake. Today I found this interesting difference with an unknown (or misspelled) command line option: “–derp”: An interesting difference! Personally, Django is reacting like I’d expect. And so for me it’s following the principle of least astonishment. Rails,…More

Python vs. Haskell round 2: Making Me a Better Programmer

Another point for Haskell In Round 1 I described the task: find the number of “Titles” in an HTML file. I started with the Python implementation, and wrote this test: Very simple: I had already downloaded the  web page  and so this function had to do just two things: (1) read in the file, and then (2) parse…More

Python vs. Haskell round 1: Test Output

The point goes to Haskell On the surface, it may sound silly to compare these two languages because they’re about opposite as you could get: Python is interpreted, dynamically typed, and slightly weakly typed as well. Haskell on the other hand, is compiled, statically and strongly typed. But they’re both open source, and they both…More