Python makes extensive use of a type system known as duck typing. The system is based on objects’ behaviors and interfaces. Many built-in classes and tools support this type system, which makes them pretty flexible and decoupled. Duck typing is a core concept in Python. Learning about the topic will help you understand how the language works and, more importantly, how to use this approach in your own code. In this tutorial, you’ll learn: What duck typing is and what […]

Climate change is impacting the whole planet, and getting worse every year. So you want to do something—but you’re not sure what. If you do some research you might encounter an essay by Bret Victor—What can a technologist do about climate change? There’s a whole pile of good ideas in there, and it’s worth reading, but the short version is that you can use technology to “create options for policy-makers.” And working on clean energy or efficiency is definitely a […]

You may often want to make your Python programs more interactive by responding dynamically to input from the user. Learning how to read user input from the keyboard unlocks exciting possibilities and can make your code far more useful. The ability to gather input from the keyboard with Python allows you to build programs that can respond uniquely based on the preferences, decisions, or data provided by different users. By fetching input and assigning it to variables, your code can […]

If you’re doing computations on a GPU, NVIDIA is the default, alongside its CUDA libraries. Some libraries like PyTorch support do support AMD GPUs and Macs. But from the re-implementations of NumPy, SciPy, and Pandas in the RAPIDS project, to Numba’s GPU support, NVIDIA has best software support in the Python world. Sticking to NVIDIA-specific software has some downsides, however: It won’t run on modern Mac laptops. Testing in CI is more difficult: you need custom runners that have NVIDIA […]