New Zine "Playing With Python: Two of My Favorite Lenses"

Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

15 Oct 2016, 13:55 p.m.

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2016 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

MergeSort, the feminist maker meetup I co-organize, had a table at Maker Faire earlier this month. Last year we'd given away (and taught people how to cut and fold) a few of my zines, and people enjoyed that. A week before Maker Faire this year, I was attempting to nap when I was struck with the conviction that I ought to make a Python zine to give out this year.

So I did! Below is Playing with Python: 2 of my favorite lenses. (As you can see from the photos of the drafting process, I thought about mentioning pdb, various cool libraries, and other great parts of the Python ecology, but narrowed my focus to bpython and python -i.)

Playing with Python
2 of my favorite lenses
[magnifying glass and eyeglass icons]

by Sumana Harihareswara

Second and third pages of zine; transcription below

When I'm getting a Python program running for the 1st time, playing around & lightly sketching or prototyping to figure out what I want to do, I [heart]:
bpython & python -i

[illustrations: sketch of a house, outline of a house in dots]

Fourth and fifth pages of zine; transcription below

bpython is an exploratory Python interpreter. It shows what you can do with an object:

>>> dogs = ["Fido", "Toto"]
>>> dogs.
append count extend index insert pop remove reverse sort

And, you can use Control-R to undo!
bpython-interpreter.org

[illustrations: bpython logo, pointer to cursor after dogs.]

Sixth and seventh pages of zine; transcription below

Use the -i flag when running a script, and when it finishes or crashes, you'll get an interactive Python session so you can inspect the state of your program at that moment!

$ python -i example.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "example.py", line 5, in 
        toprint = varname + "entries"
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for + : 'int' and 'str'
>>> varname
3
>>> type(varname)

[illustration: pointer to type(varname) asking, "wanna make a guess?"]

More: "A Few Python Tips"
harihareswara.net/talks.html
This zine made in honor of
MergeSort
NYC's feminist makerspace!
http://mergesort.nyc

CC BY-SA 2016 Sumana Harihareswara
harihareswara.net @brainwane

Everyone has something to teach;
everyone has something to learn.

Laptop displaying bpython logo next to half-scratched-out bpython logo, Python code, and technical prose written and drawn on paper, with notebook and pen and mug, on a wooden table

Here's the directory that contains those thumbnails, plus a PDF to print out and turn into an eight-page booklet with one center cut and a bit of folding. That directory also contains a screenshot of the bpython logo with a grid overlaid, in case you ever want to hand-draw it. Hand-drawing the bpython logo was the hardest thing about making this zine (beating "fitting a sample error message into the width allotted" by a narrow margin).

Libby Horacek and Anne DeCusatis not only volunteered at the MergeSort table -- they also created zines right there and then! (Libby, Anne.) The software zine heritage of The Whole Earth Software Review, 2600, BubbleSort, Julia Evans, The Recompiler, et alia continues!

(I know about bpython and python -i because I learned about them at the Recurse Center. Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center!)

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