Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

Maybe you have a Python 2 codebase. Maybe you’d like to make it work with Python 3. Maybe you really wish someone would write a comically long article on how to make that happen.

I have good news! You’re already reading one.

(And if you’re not sure why you’d want to use Python 3 in the first place, perhaps you’d be interested in the companion article which delves into exactly that question?)

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

The short answer is: because it’s the actively-developed version of the language, and you should use it for the same reason you’d use 2.7 instead of 2.6.

If you’re here, I’m guessing that’s not enough. You need something to sweeten the deal. Well, friend, I have got a whole mess of sugar cubes just for you.

And once you’re convinced, you may enjoy the companion article, how to port to Python 3! It also has some more details on the diffences between Python 2 and 3, whereas this article doesn’t focus too much on the features removed in Python 3.

…is, of course, naming.

Not just naming variables or new technologies. Oh no. We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to tell you a story. I’ve touched on this before, but this is the full version. It’s the story of hypothetical small-to-medium Internet community.

I’ve been trying to paint more lately, which means I have to actually think about color. Like an artist, I mean. I’m okay at thinking about color as a huge nerd, but I’m still figuring out how to adapt that.

While I work on that, here is some stuff about color from the huge nerd perspective, which may or may not be useful or correct.

I’m almost 30, so I have to start practicing being crotchety.

Okay, maybe not all video games, but something curious has definitely happened here. Please bear with me for a moment.

Update 2016-07-27: PICO-8 0.1.8 supports music export — export "foo%d.wav" while the music tab is selected in the editor!

Our PICO-8 game, Under Construction, contains some music that Mel composed.

The PICO-8 can only play music that you compose with the PICO-8, and it doesn’t have a music export. This posed a slight problem.

I solved that problem, and learned some things about audio along the way. None of this will be news to anyone who’s worked with sound before, but if you know as little about it as I do, you might find it as interesting as I did.

I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is.

I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because I’ve implemented it before, for flax, and that took several days of poring over half a dozen clumsy explanations that were more interested in showing off tech demos than actually explaining what was going on. The few helpful resources I found were often wrong, and left me with no real intuitive grasp of how and why it works.

Here’s the post I wish I could’ve read in the first place.

Nova Dasterin asks, with money:

How about usage of Lua for game development? Love2d etc. Also http://lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php which I recently heard about.

clarification: thoughts on Lua as a ‘good choice’, also Lua vs Python for that subject (gamedev)

There are a couple ways I can interpret this, so I’ll go with: all of them.

(edit: you may be interested in a subsequent post about the game I actually made for the PICO-8!)

Decimal sucks.

Ten is such an awkward number. Its only divisors are two and five. Two is nice, but five? Who cares about five? What about three and four?

I have a simple solution to all of these non-problems and more, which is: we should switch to base twelve.

Programmers sometimes like to compliment code as elegant, yet I can’t recall ever seeing a satisfying explanation of what “elegant code” is. Perhaps it’s telling that I see “elegant” used much less often by more experienced programmers, who opt for more concrete commentary.

Surely elegance is a quality to strive for, but how are we to strive for something we can’t define? “I know it when we see it” isn’t good enough.

I think about this from time to time. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

I love emoji. I love Unicode in general. I love seeing plain text become more expressive and more universal.

But, Internet, I’ve noticed a worrying trend. Both popular media and a lot of tech circles tend to assume that “emoji” de facto means Apple’s particular font.

I have some objections.

I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed.

Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a few… quirks… of frontend Web development.

(No, really, do not try to diagnose this problem from one sentence, I have heard and tried almost everything you could imagine.)

update 2016-03-19: I believe the account described below is run by a real human being, but for the sake of their privacy I’m not going to tell you why. I’m leaving this post up, though, because it’s an interesting story and also this was a hecka creepy thing to do.

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@softfennec and @orezpraw brought to my attention the following tweet, which I have to reconstruct from memory for reasons that will be clear in a moment:

I like to think I’m okay at math, but then I stumble into Math SE and it’s Latin to me. http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532

What a hilarious joke! I liked it so much that it turns out I’d already made it myself:

i like to think i’m ok at math but then i stumble into math.SE and it is basically lorem ipsum to me http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532

— @eevee, Feb 21 at 10:49am

This month — which I will pretend is still February, because time zones or something — Vladimir Costescu has sponsored a post on:

OK, how about this: write a post on what you think about (the concept of) Valentine’s Day. Bonus points if you write a brief commentary on this video and work it into the post somehow.

I… I’m afraid I don’t know how to work death metal performed by vampires into a post about anything else.

But Valentine’s Day, I think I can do.

I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell:

We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usage and drive people away

There’s an interesting problem here. UI is hard. You can’t just slap a button on the screen for every feature that could conceivably be used at any given time. Some features are only of interest to so-called “power users”, so they’re left subtle, spread by word-of-mouth. Some features you try to make invisible and heuristic. Some features are added just to solve one influential user’s problem. Some features are, ah, accidental.

A sufficiently mature, popular, and interesting product thus tends to accumulate a small pile of hidden features, sometimes not documented or even officially acknowledged. I’d say this is actually a good thing! Using something for a while should absolutely reward you with a new trick every so often — that below-the-surface knowledge makes you feel involved with the thing you’re using and makes it feel deeper overall.

The hard part is striking a balance. On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. On the other end you have tools like vim, which consist exclusively of easter eggs.

One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them.

Here, then, is a list of all the non-obvious things about Twitter that I know. Consider it both a reference for people who aren’t up to their eyeballs in Twitter, and an example of how these hidden features can pile up. I’m also throwing in a couple notes on etiquette, because I think that’s strongly informed by the shape of the platform.

Stephen Fry has deleted his Twitter account after backlash from an incident I can only describe as very British. He vaguely explains:

…let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined.

There’s a bit of a semantic trick in his post, and it took me a couple reads to pick up on it.