crista / exercises-in-programming-style

Comprehensive collection of programming styles using a simple computational task, term frequency

Exercises in Programming Style

Comprehensive collection of well-known, and not so well-known, programming styles using a simple computational task, term frequency. All programs run with the following command line:

python tf-NN.py ../pride-and-prejudice.txt

NOTE: the code in the master branch is written for Python 3. If you are looking for a version for Python 2.7, check out the 2.7 branch or the v1.0 release.

Explanations and historical context for all these styles can be found in the companion book Exercises in Programming Style.

Additions are welcome!

You can contribute:

• new exercises related to the existing styles
• an entirely new programming style
• new names for the existing styles
• discussion of names, pros and cons of each style

Because this project and the companion book are used in courses, at the suggestion of several students I am no longer accepting contributions of the existing styles written in different programming languages. That is the first exercise that the students do. Having the solutions easily available here will rob future students of the learning experience!

Please follow the conventions suggested by the existing code base, specifically, if you are contributing a new style, make a new folder called nn-funname and add an example program in that folder called tf-nn.ext. (nn is the next avalaible number in the collection) Additionally, add a README.md file that clearly describes the contraints for writing programs in that style. I will only consider new styles corresponding to constraints that are clearly different from the ones that already exist in the collection. (different programs written in existing styles are exercises for students, and should not be here)

Contributions of new names and discussion should be done under Issues or on the Wiki part of this repo.

To test your work, make sure your script is executable and then run:

./test/test.sh NN

Where NN is the number prefix of the directory you're adding.

Never stop exercising!

Love, Crista

P.S. Inspiration for this collection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style

exercises-in-programming-style's Issues

Would there be solutions?

I can sense that the exercises if solved will be helpful, but i just can't figure out how to do the exercise converting TFTheOne class into functions and editting wrap and bind. The hint/specifications are insufficient for me to start.

Does anyone have examples of the exercises solved?

Need help with 'Good Old Times'

Okay, I am so utterly confused! I'm trying very hard to figure this lesson out and I felt like I haven't learned anything except how to put parentheses in 'print'. Here is what I am having trouble with:

1. How do you filter the characters in Part 1?
2. It says to read the input file. What input file?
3. Another instruction says to find 25 frequency words in Part 2. What 25 frequency words?
4. How do you load the list of stop words?
5. How do you loop over the secondary memory file?
6. When I ran the lesson in my Python program, the message said that the stop_words.txt is not found. How do I fix this?

Good old times has an incorrect line

del data[:]

As far as I know, this line would not have the desired effect of clearing the data memory. The slice notation Python makes a copy of the data. So that's not what we want. To fit in with the rest of the code and allow old data to be garbage collected, just assign an empty list to the data variable.

More programming languages

I just saw yr talk of the JoC conference.

Now I found that the "pipeline" style comes in several languages but the other ones I checked out didn't. Is there a reason for this?

For yr talk I learned you do assignments in a course you teach, where students pick a not-Python (maybe also non-Prolog???) language to "port" all the exercises to.

Would it be an idea to merge this project into the Rosetta Stone of programming languages? Your students probably already did most of the work already :)

34: "the C flow" name correct?

The constraints seem contrary to C-style programming. We love those early returns and efficient breaks, e.g. terminate a search loop.

I remember these constraints as a style called "single entry, single exit", with the additional constraint that there can only be a single return statement. This usually results in the possible return value being stored in a variable first.

Cool project. Good luck with the book.

Missing one frequency in tf-03.py

Line 48 should be for w, c in wf_sorted[:26]: instead of for w, c in wf_sorted[:25]:

data[1] doesn't need to be a list

In Good Old Times, data[1] doesn't need to be a list because the list always only has one item. It can be changed to str instead.

Method chaining, aka fluent interface?

Has this style been covered?

Though it applies strictly to OOP it's very popular these days, particular in testing, SQL, and javascript (jQuery, Underscore).

Python 2 vs Python 3

All of the Python examples are written in Python 2 instead of Python 3. I think it would be a good idea to encourage the use of Python 3 in newly written materials given that Python 2 has been feature-frozen since July 2010. Python 3 is the future.

Did you have a specific reason around using Python 2?

seeking slides for teaching "exercises in style" to 400-level students

i can find the great intro deck:

• http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-aar-2013/slides/CristinaVideiraLopes_ExercisesInStyle.pdf

there looks like lots of good material on-line, but its password protected

• http://www.ics.uci.edu/~lopes/teaching/inf102S14/

anyone want to share slides on this materia?

i need book's codes in js instead of Python

i need book's codes in js instead of Python

what's the benefits putting string into a list in this way stack.append([f.read()])

as in Forth, why not just stack.append(f.read()).

as in good-old-time, data[1] = [f.readline()], data[1][0].... not data[1] = f.readline(), and using data[1] as the content directly?

Meaning of "elimination of symbol c(or i, tf) is exercise" in 01-good-old-times

exercises-in-programming-style/01-good-old-times/tf-01.py

Line 60 in d521abd

for c in data[1][0]: # elimination of symbol c is exercise

Does this sentence mean that we try to remove symbol c by applying other programming style (e.g., by using lambda expression)?

Trailing semicolon in the statement

What is the use of the trailing semicolon on line 69?

exercises-in-programming-style/06-pipeline/tf-06.py

Line 69 in 88bb3ee

print_all(word_freqs[1:]);

It seems to be useless and is not considered to be 'Pythonic' syntax. This was probably just copied from the book?