The monthly digest #01

22 April 2018

Pedagogy in Computer Science (mainly Python)

Python Buffer protocol: the PEP 3118 and a human-oriented explanation;
Python and Qt examples, with Solitaire, Paint and Minesweeper in few lines of Python!
I enjoyed the talk Building Interactive Applications and Dashboards in the Jupyter Notebook by Bloomberg, esp. the presentation of their bqplot tool. It is a shame that the notebook used in the presentation has not been released to the public. Yet it may have triggered a change of my mind about interactive visualisation in my daily routine, maybe…
Keep in mind to have a look at traitlets and pythreejs;
A great set of zines by Julia Evans, explaining the all you need to know about Unix;
(and even more)
As I made the switch to Jupyter Lab and got a list of installed kernels long forgotten on the homepage, I did some quick update of my references.
- R and Julia kernels look very mature now;
- The latest OCaml kernel is now much better than the previous state-of-the-art proof of concept. The repository comes with a set of notebooks for Datascience in OCaml;
- Didn’t try Go, Haskell, didn’t find anything decent for Scala or Rust.
  Note to myself: learn those languages first!
The standard unix password manager with browser extensions, smartphone applications and git repository integration. Since you will need a GPG key, check also keybase.io.

The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font;
Cursive handwring and other education myths;
Shady Characters, by Keith Houston,
If it hadn’t been written, I would have tried to start it! An investigation of the history of many characters, (and sometimes just a book of history). It covers the pilcrow ¶, the interrobang, the octothorpe #, the ampersand &, the @ character (with its multiple names), the asterisk ∗ and dagger †, the hyphen ‐, the dash –, the manicule ☞ and quotation marks “ ”.
By the way, since we talk about quotation marks ☞ Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

Technically wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher,
No comment, just consider it ★★★★★
I have just discovered Théodore Poussin although we are about the same age…
The webradio Arte Radio: Mycose the night is really fun!
A good old sketch by the Monty Python