This is a great idea!
Motivation
The Python docs are ill-suited to novices.
The content of the built-in functions documentation favors precision and correctness over comprehension for beginners. While this style is great for experienced developers who already understand the finer points of Python’s design, the docs are confusing to novice programmers like a 12 year old who is not far on his journey of learning Python.
This guide is an opinionated and simplified description of Python’s built-in functions.
My goal is to provide definitions, in plain English, of each built-in function that comes with Python. Along with each definition is an example that is as simple as I can think of. I ran each example against the latest version of Python as of the time writing this guide.
I want to be able to share this with my 12 year old son or my 10 year old daughter, so that they can understand and use Python. My hope is that this guide also serves others who would like some plain definitions of what the built-in functions do.
A note for pedants: I am sacrificing precision and exactness in favor of comprehension. That means I will use substitionary language that I think will communicate more clearly than the exact terminology. If you’re looking for that level of precision, please refer to the standard library docs. Those docs are great for that level of clarity.
For the rest of us, let’s go!
That's a nice addition for those that want security over convenience. I wonder why it took them 11 years after this was written to add it.
It provides for control over certain functions, but it is underutilized.
I like the diversity of sphincter options in unicode and encourage their use. Here are a few of my favorites:
✲
✵
✺
❂
This is a web service that returns the ActivityPub data for any URL that returns an ActivityPub message. For instance this post (https://lemmy.ml/post/19589249) returns:
{
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"https://join-lemmy.org/context.json",
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"to": [
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"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"name": "BrowserPub: A browser for debugging ActivityPub and the ⁂fediverse",
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"published": "2024-08-26T11:43:09.033551Z",
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Prepend https://browser.pub/ to the URL you want to check:
https://browser.pub/https://lemmy.ml/post/19589249
So this is a web service that returns the ActivityPub data for any URL that returns an ActivityPub message. For instance this post (https://lemmy.ml/post/19589301) returns:
{
"@context": [
"https://join-lemmy.org/context.json",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
],
"type": "Page",
"id": "https://lemmy.ml/post/19589301",
"attributedTo": "https://lemmy.ml/u/hongminhee",
"to": [
"https://programming.dev/c/activitypub",
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"name": "BrowserPub: A browser for debugging ActivityPub and the ⁂fediverse",
"cc": [],
"mediaType": "text/html",
"attachment": [
{
"href": "https://podcastindex.social/@js/113011966366461060",
"mediaType": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
"type": "Link"
}
],
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"published": "2024-08-26T11:44:00.478179Z",
"language": {
"identifier": "en",
"name": "English"
},
"audience": "https://programming.dev/c/activitypub",
"tag": [
{
"href": "https://lemmy.ml/post/19589301",
"name": "#activitypub",
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Some key quotes from the article:
It’s perfectly reasonable for a consumer cloud storage provider to design a system that emphasizes recoverability over security. Apple’s customers are far more likely to lose their password/iPhone than they are to be the subject of a National Security Letter or data breach (hopefully, anyway).
I wish that companies like Apple could just come right out and warn their users: ‘We have access to all your data, we do bulk-encrypt it, but it’s still available to us and to law enforcement whenever necessary’.
So what is the alternative?
Well, for a consumer-focused system, maybe there really isn’t one. Ultimately people back up their data because they’re afraid of losing their devices, which cuts against the idea of storing encryption keys inside of devices.
You could take the PGP approach and back up your decryption keys to some other location (your PC, for example, or a USB stick). But this hasn’t proven extremely popular with the general public, because it’s awkward — and sometimes insecure.
Alternatively, you could use a password to derive the encryption/decryption keys. This approach works fine if your users pick decent passwords (although they mostly won’t), and if they promise not to forget them. But of course, the convenience of Apple’s “iForgot” service indicates that Apple isn’t banking on users remembering their passwords. So that’s probably out too.
Follow up with what is sometimes called the Unix Bible: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-and-linux/9780134278308/