About the disdain for XML among Python programmers

Rust has some really nice functional programming facilities built in, all around an iterator concept. Rust being focused on performance and low level control makes it possible to use this without paying a performance cost. Sometimes I still prefer to use the humble for loop though. In quite a few cases, it combines high performance with high...

I've seen some programmers try to avoid the humble for loop at all costs, in favor of more functional abstractions. I'm going to argue that the for loop is sometimes simply the best option. That doesn't mean you should always use it -- far from it -- but it does mean you should give it due consideration. The goal is to help develop some...

Print good, not bad!

In software development we have best practices. These are the distilled wisdom of software engineering, and you should follow best practices to be a good software developer, and to develop good software. If someone points out you broke them, that should be sufficient to make you mend your ways. This is what the term "best practices" implies to me...

Part five in a series about my teenage adventures learning about computers and programming in the 1980s: achieving assembly