Older blog entries for glyph (starting at number 38)

As some of you may have guessed from the unintentional recent flurry of activity on my Twitter account, twitter feed, the service I used to use to post blog links automatically, is getting end-of-lifed. I've switched to dlvr.it for the time being, unless they send another unsolicited tweetstorm out on my behalf...

Sorry about the noise! In the interests of putting some actual content here, maybe you would be interested to know that I was recently interviewed for PyDev of the Week?

Syndicated 2016-10-18 20:37:00 from Deciphering Glyph

Hitting The Wall

I’m an introvert.

I say that with a full-on appreciation of just how awful thinkpieces on “introverts” are.

However, I feel compelled to write about this today because of a certain type of social pressure that a certain type of introvert faces. Specifically, I am a high-energy introvert.

Cementing this piece’s place in the hallowed halls of just awful thinkpieces, allow me to compare my mild cognitive fatigue with the plight of those suffering from chronic illness and disability1. There’s a social phenomenon associated with many chronic illnesses, “but you don’t LOOK sick”, where well-meaning people will look at someone who is suffering, with no obvious symptoms, and imply that they really ought to be able to “be normal”.

As a high-energy introvert, I frequently participate in social events. I go to meet-ups and conferences and I engage in plenty of public speaking. I am, in a sense, comfortable extemporizing in front of large groups of strangers.

This all sounds like extroverted behavior, I know. But there’s a key difference.

Let me posit two axes for personality type: on the X axis, “introvert” to “extrovert”, and on the Y, “low energy” up to “high energy”.

The X axis describes what kinds of activities give you energy, and the Y axis describes how large your energy reserves are for the other type.

Notice that I didn’t say which type of activity you enjoy.

Most people who would self-describe as “introverts” are in the low-energy/introvert quadrant. They have a small amount of energy available for social activities, which they need to frequently re-charge by doing solitary activities. As a result of frequently running out of energy for social activities, they don’t enjoy social activities.

Most people who would self-describe as “extroverts” are also on the “low-energy” end of the spectrum. They have low levels of patience for solitary activity, and need to re-charge by spending time with friends, going to parties, etc, in order to have the mental fortitude to sit still for a while and focus. Since they can endlessly get more energy from the company of others, they tend to enjoy social activities quite a bit.

Therefore we have certain behaviors we expect to see from “introverts”. We expect them to be shy, and quiet, and withdrawn. When someone who behaves this way has to bail on a social engagement, this is expected. There’s a certain affordance for it. If you spend a few hours with them, they may be initially friendly but will visibly become uncomfortable and withdrawn.

This “energy” model of personality is of course an oversimplification - it’s my personal belief that everyone needs some balance of privacy and socialization and solitude and eventually overdoing one or the other will be bad for anyone - but it’s a useful one.

As a high-energy introvert, my behavior often confuses people. I’ll show up at a week’s worth of professional events, be the life of the party, go out to dinner at all of them, and then disappear for a month. I’m not visibily shy - quite the opposite, I’m a gregarious raconteur. In fact, I quite visibly enjoy the company of friends. So, usually, when I try to explain that I am quite introverted, this claim is met with (quite understandable) skepticism.

In fact, I am quite functionally what society expects of an “extrovert” - until I hit the wall.


In endurance sports, one is said to “hit the wall” at the point where all the short-term energy reserves in one’s muscles are exhausted, and there is a sudden, dramatic loss of energy. Regardless, many people enjoy endurance sports; part of the challenge of them is properly managing your energy.

This is true for me and social situations. I do enjoy social situations quite a bit! But they are nevertheless quite taxing for me, and without prolonged intermissions of solitude, eventually I get to the point where I can no longer behave as a normal social creature without an excruciating level of effort and anxiety.

Several years ago, I attended a prolonged social event2 where I hit the wall, hard. The event itself was several hours too long for me, involved meeting lots of strangers, and in the lead-up to it I hadn’t had a weekend to myself for a few weeks due to work commitments and family stuff. Towards the end I noticed I was developing a completely flat affect, and had to start very consciously performing even basic body language, like looking at someone while they were talking or smiling. I’d never been so exhausted and numb in my life; at the time I thought I was just stressed from work.

Afterwards though, I started having a lot of weird nightmares, even during the daytime. This concerned me, since I’d never had such a severe reaction to a social situation, and I didn’t have good language to describe it. It was also a little perplexing that what was effectively a nice party, the first half of which had even been fun for me, would cause such a persistent negative reaction after the fact. After some research, I eventually discovered that such involuntary thoughts are a hallmark of PTSD.

While I’ve managed to avoid this level of exhaustion before or since, this was a real learning experience for me that the consequences of incorrectly managing my level of social interaction can be quite severe.

I’d rather not do that again.


The reason I’m writing this, though3, is not to avoid future anxiety. My social energy reserves are quite large enough, and I now have enough self-knowledge, that it is extremely unlikely I’d ever find myself in that situation again.

The reason I’m writing is to help people understand that I’m not blowing them off because I don’t like them. Many times now, I’ve declined or bailed an invitation from someone, and later heard that they felt hurt that I was passive-aggressively refusing to be friendly.

I certainly understand this reaction. After all, if you see someone at a party and they’re clearly having a great time and chatting with everyone, but then when you invite them to do something, they say “sorry, too much social stuff”, that seems like a pretty passive-aggressive way to respond.

You might even still be skeptical after reading this. “Glyph, if you were really an introvert, surely, I would have seen you looking a little shy and withdrawn. Surely I’d see some evidence of stage fright before your talks.”

But that’s exactly the problem here: no, you wouldn’t.

At a social event, since I have lots of energy to begin with, I’ll build up a head of steam on burning said energy that no low-energy introvert would ever risk. If I were to run out of social-interaction-juice, I’d be in the middle of a big crowd telling a long and elaborate story when I find myself exhausted. If I hit the wall in that situation, I can’t feel a little awkward and make excuses and leave; I’ll be stuck creepily faking a smile like a sociopath and frantically looking for a way out of the converstaion for an hour, as the pressure from a large crowd of people rapidly builds up months worth of nightmare fuel from my spiraling energy deficit.

Given that I know that’s what’s going to happen, you won’t see me when I’m close to that line. You won’t be in at my desk when I silently sit and type for a whole day, or on my couch when I quietly read a book for ten hours at a time. My solitary side is, by definition, hidden.

But, if I don’t show up to your party, I promise: it’s not you, it’s me.


  1. In all seriousness: this is a comparison of kind and not of degree. I absolutely do not have any illusions that my minor mental issues are a serious disability. They are - by definition, since I do not have a diagnosis - subclinical. I am describing a minor annoyance and frequent miscommunication in this post, not a personal tragedy. 

  2. I’ll try to keep this anonymous, so hopefully you can’t guess - I don’t want to make anyone feel bad about this, since it was my poor time-management and not their (lovely!) event which caused the problem. 

  3. ... aside from the hope that maybe someone else has had trouble explaining the same thing, and this will be a useful resource for them ... 

Syndicated 2016-09-17 21:18:00 from Deciphering Glyph

Probably best to get this out of the way before this weekend:

If I meet you at a technical conference, you’ll probably see me extend my elbow in your direction, rather than my hand. This is because I won’t shake your hand at a conference.

People sometimes joke about “con crud”, but the amount of lost productivity and human misery generated by conference-transmitted sickness is not funny. Personally, by the time the year is out, I will most likely have attended 5 conferences. This means that if I get sick at each one, I will spend more than a month out of the year out of commission being sick.

When I tell people this, they think I’m a germophobe. But, in all likelihood, I won’t be the one getting sick. I already have 10 years of building up herd immunity to the set of minor ailments that afflict the international Python-conference-attending community. It’s true that I don’t particularly want to get sick myself, but I happily shake people’s hands in more moderately-sized social gatherings. I’ve had a cold before and I’ve had one again; I have no illusion that ritually dousing myself in Purell every day will make me immune to all disease.

I’m not shaking your hand because I don’t want you to get sick. Please don’t be weird about it!

Syndicated 2016-08-17 18:42:00 from Deciphering Glyph

A Container Is A Function Call

It seems to me that the prevailing mental model among users of container technology1 right now is that a container is a tiny little virtual machine. It’s like a machine in the sense that it is provisioned and deprovisioned by explicit decisions, and we talk about “booting” containers. We configure it sort of like we configure a machine; dropping a bunch of files into a volume, setting some environment variables.

In my mind though, a container is something fundamentally different than a VM. Rather than coming from the perspective of “let’s take a VM and make it smaller so we can do cool stuff” - get rid of the kernel, get rid of fixed memory allocations, get rid of emulated memory access and instructions, so we can provision more of them at higher density... I’m coming at it from the opposite direction.

For me, containers are “let’s take a program and made it bigger so we can do cool stuff”. Let’s add in the whole user-space filesystem so it’s got all the same bits every time, so we don’t need to worry about library management, so we can ship it around from computer to computer as a self-contained unit. Awesome!

Of course, there are other ecosystems that figured this out a really long time ago, but having it as a commodity within the most popular server deployment environment has changed things.

Of course, an individual container isn’t a whole program. That’s why we need tools like compose to put containers together into a functioning whole. This makes a container not just a program, but rather, a part of a program. And of course, we all know what the smaller parts of a program are called:

Functions.2

A container of course is not the function itself; the image is the function. A container itself is a function call.

Perceived through this lens, it becomes apparent that Docker is missing some pretty important information. As a tiny VM, it has all the parts you need: it has an operating system (in the docker build) the ability to boot and reboot (docker run), instrumentation (docker inspect) debugging (docker exec) etc. As a really big function, it’s strangely anemic.

Specifically: in every programming language worth its salt, we have a type system; some mechanism to identify what parameters a function will take, and what return value it will have.

You might find this weird coming from a Python person, a language where

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def foo(a, b, c):
    return a.x(c.d(b))

is considered an acceptable level of type documentation by some3; there’s no requirement to say what a, b, and c are. However, just because the type system is implicit, that doesn’t mean it’s not there, even in the text of the program. Let’s consider, from reading this tiny example, what we can discover:

  • foo takes 3 arguments, their names are “a”, “b”, and “c”, and it returns a value.
  • Somewhere else in the codebase there’s an object with an x method, which takes a single argument and also returns a value.
  • The type of <unknown>.x’s argument is the same as the return type of another method somewhere in the codebase, <unknown-2>.d

And so on, and so on. At runtime each of these types takes on a specific, concrete value, with a type, and if you set a breakpoint and single-step into it with a debugger, you can see each of those types very easily. Also at runtime you will get TypeError exceptions telling you exactly what was wrong with what you tried to do at a number of points, if you make a mistake.

The analogy to containers isn’t exact; inputs and outputs aren’t obviously in the shape of “arguments” and “return values”, especially since containers tend to be long-running; but nevertheless, a container does have inputs and outputs in the form of env vars, network services, and volumes.

Let’s consider the “foo” of docker, which would be the middle tier of a 3-tier web application (cribbed from a real live example):

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FROM pypy:2
RUN apt-get update -ym
RUN apt-get upgrade -ym
RUN apt-get install -ym libssl-dev libffi-dev
RUN pip install virtualenv
RUN mkdir -p /code/env
RUN virtualenv /code/env
RUN pwd

COPY requirements.txt /code/requirements.txt
RUN /code/env/bin/pip install -r /code/requirements.txt
COPY main /code/main
RUN chmod a+x /code/main

VOLUME /clf
VOLUME /site
VOLUME /etc/ssl/private

ENTRYPOINT ["/code/main"]

In this file, we can only see three inputs, which are filesystem locations: /clf, /site, and /etc/ssl/private. How is this different than our Python example, a language with supposedly “no type information”?

  • The image has no metadata explaining what might go in those locations, or what roles they serve. We have no way to annotate them within the Dockerfile.
  • What services does this container need to connect to in order to get its job done? What hostnames will it connect to, what ports, and what will it expect to find there? We have no way of knowing. It doesn’t say. Any errors about the failed connections will come in a custom format, possibly in logs, from the application itself, and not from docker.
  • What services does this container export? It could have used an EXPOSE line to give us a hint, but it doesn’t need to; and even if it did, all we’d have is a port number.
  • What environment variables does its code require? What format do they need to be in?
  • We do know that we could look in requirements.txt to figure out what libraries are going to be used, but in order to figure out what the service dependencies are, we’re going to need to read all of the code to all of them.

Of course, the one way that this example is unrealistic is that I deleted all the comments explaining all of those things. Indeed, best practice these days would be to include comments in your Dockerfiles, and include example compose files in your repository, to give users some hint as to how these things all wire together.

This sort of state isn’t entirely uncommon in programming languages. In fact, in this popular GitHub project you can see that large programs written in assembler in the 1960s included exactly this sort of documentation convention: huge front-matter comments in English prose.

That is the current state of the container ecosystem. We are at the “late ’60s assembly language” stage of orchestration development. It would be a huge technological leap forward to be able to communicate our intent structurally.


When you’re building an image, you’re building it for a particular purpose. You already pretty much know what you’re trying to do and what you’re going to need to do it.

  1. When instantiated, the image is going to consume network services. This is not just a matter of hostnames and TCP ports; those services need to be providing a specific service, over a specific protocol. A generic reverse proxy might be able to handle an arbitrary HTTP endpoint, but an API client needs that specific API. A database admin tool might be OK with just “it’s a database” but an application needs a particular schema.
  2. It’s going to consume environment variables. But not just any variables; the variables have to be in a particular format.
  3. It’s going to consume volumes. The volumes need to contain data in a particular format, readable and writable by a particular UID.
  4. It’s also going to produce all of these things; it may listen on a network service port, provision a database schema, or emit some text that needs to be fed back into an environment variable elsewhere.

Here’s a brief sketch of what I want to see in a Dockerfile to allow me to express this sort of thing:

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FROM ...
RUN ...

LISTENS ON: TCP:80 FOR: org.ietf.http/com.example.my-application-api
CONNECTS TO: pgwritemaster.internal ON: TCP:5432 FOR: org.postgresql.db/com.example.my-app-schema
CONNECTS TO: {{ETCD_HOST}} ON: TCP:{{ETCD_PORT}} FOR: com.coreos.etcd/client-communication
ENVIRONMENT NEEDS: ETCD_HOST FORMAT: HOST(com.coreos.etcd/client-communication)
ENVIRONMENT NEEDS: ETCD_PORT FORMAT: PORT(com.coreos.etcd/client-communication)
VOLUME AT: /logs FORMAT: org.w3.clf REQUIRES: WRITE UID: 4321

An image thusly built would refuse to run unless:

  • Somewhere else on its network, there was an etcd host/port known to it, its host and port supplied via environment variables.
  • Somewhere else on its network, there was a postgres host, listening on port 5432, with a name-resolution entry of “pgwritemaster.internal”.
  • An environment variable for the etcd configuration was supplied
  • A writable volume for /logs was supplied, owned by user-ID 4321 where it could write common log format logs.

There are probably a lot of flaws in the specific syntax here, but I hope you can see past that, to the broader point that the software inside a container has precise expectations of its environment, and that we presently have no way of communicating those expectations beyond writing a Melvilleian essay in each Dockerfile comments, beseeching those who would run the image to give it what it needs.


Why bother with this sort of work, if all the image can do with it is “refuse to run”?

First and foremost, today, the image effectively won’t run. Oh, it’ll start up, and it’ll consume some resources, but it will break when you try to do anything with it. What this metadata will allow the container runtime to do is to tell you why the image didn’t run, and give you specific, actionable, fast feedback about what you need to do in order to fix the problem. You won’t have to go groveling through logs; which is always especially hard if the back-end service you forgot to properly connect to was the log aggregation service. So this will be an order of magnitude speed improvement on initial deployments and development-environment setups for utility containers. Whole applications typically already come with a compose file, of course, but ideally applications would be built out of functioning self-contained pieces and not assembled one custom container at a time.

Secondly, if there were a strong tooling standard for providing this metadata within the image itself, it might become possible for infrastructure service providers (like, ahem, my employer) to automatically detect and satisfy service dependencies. Right now, if you have a database as a service that lives outside the container system in production, but within the container system in development and test, there’s no way for the orchestration layer to say “good news, everyone! you can find the database you need here: ...”.

My main interest is in allowing open source software developers to give service operators exactly what they need, so the upstream developers can get useful bug reports. There’s a constant tension where volunteer software developers find themselves fielding bug reports where someone deployed their code in a weird way, hacked it up to support some strange environment, built a derived container that had all kinds of extra junk in it to support service discovery or logging or somesuch, and so they don’t want to deal with the support load that that generates. Both people in that exchange are behaving reasonably. The developers gave the ops folks a container that runs their software to the best of their abilities. The service vendors made the minimal modifications they needed to have the container become a part of their service fabric. Yet we arrive at a scenario where nobody feels responsible for the resulting artifact.

If we could just say what it is that the container needs in order to really work, in a way which was precise and machine-readable, then it would be clear where the responsibility lies. Service providers could just run the container unmodified, and they’d know very clearly whether or not they’d satisfied its runtime requirements. Open source developers - or even commercial service vendors! - could say very clearly what they expected to be passed in, and when they got bug reports, they’d know exactly how their service should have behaved.


  1. which mostly but not entirely just means “docker”; it’s weird, of course, because there are pieces that docker depends on and tools that build upon docker which are part of this, but docker remains the nexus. 

  2. Yes yes, I know that they’re not really functions Tristan, they’re subroutines, but that’s the word people use for “subroutines” nowadays. 

  3. Just to be clear: no it isn’t. Write a damn docstring, or at least some type annotations

Syndicated 2016-08-14 22:22:00 from Deciphering Glyph

Python Packaging Is Good Now

Okay folks. Time’s up. It’s too late to say that Python’s packaging ecosystem terrible any more. I’m calling it.

Python packaging is not bad any more. If you’re a developer, and you’re trying to create or consume Python libraries, it can be a tractable, even pleasant experience.

I need to say this, because for a long time, Python’s packaging toolchain was … problematic. It isn’t any more, but a lot of people still seem to think that it is, so it’s time to set the record straight.

If you’re not familiar with the history it went something like this:

The Dawn

Python first shipped in an era when adding a dependency meant a veritable Odyssey into cyberspace. First, you’d wait until nobody in your whole family was using the phone line. Then you’d dial your ISP. Once you’d finished fighting your SLIP or PPP client, you’d ask a netnews group if anyone knew of a good gopher site to find a library that could solve your problem. Once you were done with that task, you’d sign off the Internet for the night, and wait about 48 hours too see if anyone responded. If you were lucky enough to get a reply, you’d set up a download at the end of your night’s web-surfing.

pip search it wasn’t.

For the time, Python’s approach to dependency-handling was incredibly forward-looking. The import statement, and the pluggable module import system, made it easy to get dependencies from wherever made sense.

In Python 2.01, Distutils was introduced. This let Python developers describe their collections of modules abstractly, and added tool support to producing redistributable collections of modules and packages. Again, this was tremendously forward-looking, if somewhat primitive; there was very little to compare it to at the time.

Fast forwarding to 2004; setuptools was created to address some of the increasingly-common tasks that open source software maintainers were facing with distributing their modules over the internet. In 2005, it added easy_install, in order to provide a tool to automate resolving dependencies and downloading them into the right locations.

The Dark Age

Unfortunately, in addition to providing basic utilities for expressing dependencies, setuptools also dragged in a tremendous amount of complexity. Its author felt that import should do something slightly different than what it does, so installing setuptools changed it. The main difference between normal import and setuptools import was that it facilitated having multiple different versions of the same library in the same program at the same time. It turns out that that’s a dumb idea, but in fairness, it wasn’t entirely clear at the time, and it is certainly useful (and necessary!) to be able to have multiple versions of a library installed onto a computer at the same time.

In addition to these idiosyncratic departures from standard Python semantics, setuptools suffered from being unmaintained. It became a critical part of the Python ecosystem at the same time as the author was moving on to other projects entirely outside of programming. No-one could agree on who the new maintainers should be for a long period of time. The project was forked, and many operating systems’ packaging toolchains calcified around a buggy, ancient version.

From 2008 to 2012 or so, Python packaging was a total mess. It was painful to use. It was not clear which libraries or tools to use, which ones were worth investing in or learning. Doing things the simple way was too tedious, and doing things the automated way involved lots of poorly-documented workarounds and inscrutable failure modes.

This is to say nothing of the fact that there were critical security flaws in various parts of this toolchain. There was no practical way to package and upload Python packages in such a way that users didn’t need a full compiler toolchain for their platform.

To make matters worse for the popular perception of Python’s packaging prowess2, at this same time, newer languages and environments were getting a lot of buzz, ones that had packaging built in at the very beginning and had a much better binary distribution story. These environments learned lessons from the screw-ups of Python and Perl, and really got a lot of things right from the start.

Finally, the Python Package Index, the site which hosts all the open source packages uploaded by the Python community, was basically a proof-of-concept that went live way too early, had almost no operational resources, and was offline all the dang time.

Things were looking pretty bad for Python.


Intermission

Here is we get to the point of this post - this is where popular opinion about Python packaging is stuck. Outdated information from this period abounds. Blog posts complaining about problems score high in web searches. Those who used Python during this time, but have now moved on to some other language, frequently scoff and dismiss Python as impossible to package, its packaging ecosystem as broken, PyPI as down all the time, and so on. Worst of all, bad advice for workarounds which are no longer necessary are still easy to find, which causes users to pre-emptively break their environments where they really don’t need to.


From The Ashes

In the midst of all this brokenness, there were some who were heroically, quietly, slowly fixing the mess, one gnarly bug-report at a time. pip was started, and its various maintainers fixed much of easy_install’s overcomplexity and many of its flaws. Donald Stufft stepped in both on Pip and PyPI and improved the availability of the systems it depended upon, as well as some pretty serious vulnerabilities in the tool itself. Daniel Holth wrote a PEP for the wheel format, which allows for binary redistribution of libraries. In other words, it lets authors of packages which need a C compiler to build give their users a way to not have one.

In 2013, setuptools and distribute un-forked, providing a path forward for operating system vendors to start updating their installations and allowing users to use something modern.

Python Core started distributing the ensurepip module along with both Python 2.7 and 3.3, allowing any user with a recent Python installed to quickly bootstrap into a sensible Python development environment with a one-liner.

A New Renaissance

I’m won’t give you a full run-down of the state of the packaging art. There’s already a website for that. I will, however, give you a précis of how much easier it is to get started nowadays. Today, if you want to get a sensible, up-to-date python development environment, without administrative privileges, all you have to do is:

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$ python -m ensurepip --user
$ python -m pip install --user --upgrade pip
$ python -m pip install --user --upgrade virtualenv

Then, for each project you want to do, make a new virtualenv:

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$ python -m virtualenv lets-go
$ . ./lets-go/bin/activate
(lets-go) $ _

From here on out, now the world is your oyster; you can pip install to your heart’s content, and you probably won’t even need to compile any C for most packages. These instructions don’t depend on Python version, either: as long as it’s up-to-date, the same steps work on Python 2, Python 3, PyPy and even Jython. In fact, often the ensurepip step isn’t even necessary since pip comes preinstalled. Running it if it’s unnecessary is harmless, even!

Other, more advanced packaging operations are much simpler than they used to be, too.

  • Need a C compiler? OS vendors have been working with the open source community to make this easier across the board:
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    $ apt install build-essential python-dev # ubuntu
    $ xcode-select --install # macOS
    $ dnf install @development-tools python-devel # fedora
    C:\> REM windows
    C:\> start https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266
    

Okay that last one’s not as obvious as it ought to be but they did at least make it freely available!

  • Want to upload some stuff to PyPI? This should do it for almost any project:

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    $ pip install twine
    $ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
    $ twine upload dist/*
    
  • Want to build wheels for the wild and wooly world of Linux? There’s an app4 for that.

Importantly, PyPI will almost certainly be online. Not only that, but a new, revamped site will be “launching” any day now3.

Again, this isn’t a comprehensive resource; I just want to give you an idea of what’s possible. But, as a deeply experienced Python expert I used to swear at these tools six times a day for years; the most serious Python packaging issue I’ve had this year to date was fixed by cleaning up my git repo to delete a cache file.

Work Still To Do

While the current situation is good, it’s still not great.

Here are just a few of my desiderata:

  • We still need better and more universally agreed-upon tooling for end-user deployments.
  • Pip should have a GUI frontend so that users can write Python stuff without learning as much command-line arcana.
  • There should be tools that help you write and update a setup.py. Or a setup.python.json or something, so you don’t actually need to write code just to ship some metadata.
  • The error messages that you get when you try to build something that needs a C compiler and it doesn’t work should be clearer and more actionable for users who don’t already know what they mean.
  • PyPI should automatically build wheels for all platforms by default when you upload sdists; this is a huge project, of course, but it would be super awesome default behavior.

I could go on. There are lots of ways that Python packaging could be better.

The Bottom Line

The real takeaway here though, is that although it’s still not perfect, other languages are no longer doing appreciably better. Go is still working through a number of different options regarding dependency management and vendoring, and, like Python extensions that require C dependencies, CGo is sometimes necessary and always a problem. Node has had its own well-publicized problems with their dependency management culture and package manager. Hackage is cool and all but everything takes a literal geological epoch to compile.

As always, I’m sure none of this applies to Rust and Cargo is basically perfect, but that doesn’t matter, because nobody reading this is actually using Rust.

My point is not that packaging in any of these languages is particularly bad. They’re all actually doing pretty well, especially compared to the state of the general programming ecosystem a few years ago; many of them are making regular progress towards user-facing improvements.

My point is that any commentary suggesting they’re meaningfully better than Python at this point is probably just out of date. Working with Python packaging is more or less fine right now. It could be better, but lots of people are working on improving it, and the structural problems that prevented those improvements from being adopted by the community in a timely manner have almost all been addressed.

Go! Make some virtualenvs! Hack some setup.pys! If it’s been a while and your last experience was really miserable, I promise, it’s better now.


Am I wrong? Did I screw up a detail of your favorite language? Did I forget to mention the one language environment that has a completely perfect, flawless packaging story? Do you feel the need to just yell at a stranger on the Internet about picayune details? Feel free to get in touch!


  1. released in October, 2000 

  2. say that five times fast. 

  3. although I’m not sure what it means to “launch” when the site is online, and running against the production data-store, and you can use it for pretty much everything... 

  4. “app” meaning of course “docker container” 

Syndicated 2016-08-14 09:17:00 from Deciphering Glyph

What’s In A Name

Amber’s excellent lightning talk on identity yesterday made me feel many feels, and reminded me of this excellent post by Patrick McKenzie about false assumptions regarding names.

While that list is helpful, it’s very light on positively-framed advice, i.e. “you should” rather than “you shouldn’t”. So I feel like I want to give a little bit of specific, prescriptive advice to programmers who might need to deal with names.

First and foremost: stop asking for unnecessary information. If I’m just authenticating to your system to download a comic book, you do not need to know my name. Your payment provider might need a billing address, but you absolutely do not need to store my name.

Okay, okay. I understand that may make your system seem a little impersonal, and you want to be able to greet me, or maybe have a name to show to other users beyond my login ID or email address that has to be unique on the site. Fine. Here’s what a good “name” field looks like:

You don’t need to break my name down into parts. If you just need a way to refer to me, then let me tell you whatever the heck I want. Honorific? Maybe I have more than one; maybe I don’t want you to use any.

And this brings me to “first name / last name”.

In most cases, you should not use these terms. They are oversimplifications of how names work, appropriate only for children in English-speaking countries who might not understand the subtleties involved and only need to know that one name comes before the other.

The terms you’re looking for are given name and surname, or perhaps family name. (“Middle name” might still be an appropriate term because that fills a more specific role.) But by using these more semantically useful terms, you include orders of magnitude more names in your normalization scheme. More importantly, by acknowledging the roles of the different parts of a name, you’ll come to realize that there are many other types of name, such as:

If your application does have a legitimate need to normalize names, for example, to interoperate with third-party databases, or to fulfill some regulatory requirement:

  • When you refer to a user of the system, always allow them to customize how their name is presented. Give them the benefit of the doubt. If you’re concerned about users abusing this display-name system to insult other users, it's understandable that you may need to moderate that a little. But there's no reason to ever moderate or regulate how a user's name is displayed to themselves. You can start to address offensive names by allowing other users to set nicknames for them. Only as a last resort, allow other users to report their name as not-actually-their-name, abusive or rude; if you do that, you have to investigate those reports. Let users affirm other users’ names, too, and verify reports: if someone attracts a million fake troll accounts, but all their friends affirm that their name is correct, you should be able to detect that. Don’t check government IDs in order to do this; they’re not relevant.
  • Allow the user to enter their normalized name as a series of names with classifiers attached to each one. In other words, like this:
  • Keep in mind that spaces are valid in any of these names. Many people have multi-word first names, middle names, or last names, and it can matter how you classify them. For one example that should resonate with readers of this blog, it’s “Guido” “van Rossum”, not “Guido” “Van” “Rossum”. It is definitely not “Guido” “Vanrossum”.
  • So is other punctuation. Even dashes. Even apostrophes. Especially apostrophes, you insensitive clod. Literally ten billion people whose surnames start with “O’” live in Ireland and they do not care about your broken database input security practices.
  • Allow for the user to have multiple names with classifiers attached to each one: “legal name in China”, “stage name”, “name on passport”, “maiden name”, etc. Keep in mind that more than one name for a given person may simultaneously accurate for a certain audience and legally valid. They can even be legally valid in the same context: many people have social security cards, birth certificates, driver’s licenses and passports with different names on them; sometimes due to a clerical error, sometimes due to the way different systems work. If your goal is to match up with those systems, especially more than one of them, you need to account for that possibility.

If you’re a programmer and you’re balking at this complexity: good. Remember that for most systems, sticking with the first option - treating users’ names as totally opaque text - is probably your best bet. You probably don’t need to know the structure of the user’s name for most purposes.

Syndicated 2016-08-14 00:48:00 from Deciphering Glyph

The One Python Library Everyone Needs

Do you write programs in Python? You should be using attrs.

Why, you ask? Don’t ask. Just use it.

Okay, fine. Let me back up.

I love Python; it’s been my primary programming language for 10+ years and despite a number of interesting developments in the interim I have no plans to switch to anything else.

But Python is not without its problems. In some cases it encourages you to do the wrong thing. Particularly, there is a deeply unfortunate proliferation of class inheritance and the God-object anti-pattern in many libraries.

One cause for this might be that Python is a highly accessible language, so less experienced programmers make mistakes that they then have to live with forever.

But I think that perhaps a more significant reason is the fact that Python sometimes punishes you for trying to do the right thing.

The “right thing” in the context of object design is to make lots of small, self-contained classes that do one thing and do it well. For example, if you notice your object is starting to accrue a lot of private methods, perhaps you should be making those “public”1 methods of a private attribute. But if it’s tedious to do that, you probably won’t bother.

Another place you probably should be defining an object is when you have a bag of related data that needs its relationships, invariants, and behavior explained. Python makes it soooo easy to just define a tuple or a list. The first couple of times you type host, port = ... instead of address = ... it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but then soon enough you’re typing [(family, socktype, proto, canonname, sockaddr)] = ... everywhere and your life is filled with regret. That is, if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, you’re just maintaining code that does something like values[0][7][4][HOSTNAME][“canonical”] and your life is filled with garden-variety pain rather than the more complex and nuanced emotion of regret.


This raises the question: is it tedious to make a class in Python? Let’s look at a simple data structure: a 3-dimensional cartesian coordinate. It starts off simply enough:

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class Point3D(object):

So far so good. We’ve got a 3 dimensional point. What next?

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):

Well, that’s a bit unfortunate. I just want a holder for a little bit of data, and I’ve already had to override a special method from the Python runtime with an internal naming convention? Not too bad, I suppose; all programming is weird symbols after a fashion.

At least I see my attribute names in there, that makes sense.

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x

I already said I wanted an x, but now I have to assign it as an attribute...

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x

... to x? Uh, obviously ...

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.z = z

... and now I have to do that once for every attribute, so this actually scales poorly? I have to type every attribute name 3 times?!?

Oh well. At least I’m done now.

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.z = z
    def __repr__(self):

Wait what do you mean I’m not done.

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.z = z
    def __repr__(self):
        return (self.__class__.__name__ +
                ("(x={}, y={}, z={})".format(self.x, self.y, self.z)))

Oh come on. So I have to type every attribute name 5 times, if I want to be able to see what the heck this thing is when I’m debugging, which a tuple would have given me for free?!?!?

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.z = z
    def __repr__(self):
        return (self.__class__.__name__ +
                ("(x={}, y={}, z={})".format(self.x, self.y, self.z)))
    def __eq__(self, other):
        if not isinstance(other, self.__class__):
            return NotImplemented
        return (self.x, self.y, self.z) == (other.x, other.y, other.z)

7 times?!?!?!?

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class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.z = z
    def __repr__(self):
        return (self.__class__.__name__ +
                ("(x={}, y={}, z={})".format(self.x, self.y, self.z)))
    def __eq__(self, other):
        if not isinstance(other, self.__class__):
            return NotImplemented
        return (self.x, self.y, self.z) == (other.x, other.y, other.z)
    def __lt__(self, other):
        if not isinstance(other, self.__class__):
            return NotImplemented
        return (self.x, self.y, self.z) < (other.x, other.y, other.z)

9 times?!?!?!?!?

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from functools import total_ordering
@total_ordering
class Point3D(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
        self.z = z
    def __repr__(self):
        return (self.__class__.__name__ +
                ("(x={}, y={}, z={})".format(self.x, self.y, self.z)))
    def __eq__(self, other):
        if not isinstance(other, self.__class__):
            return NotImplemented
        return (self.x, self.y, self.z) == (other.x, other.y, other.z)
    def __lt__(self, other):
        if not isinstance(other, self.__class__):
            return NotImplemented
        return (self.x, self.y, self.z) < (other.x, other.y, other.z)

Okay, whew - 2 more lines of code isn’t great, but now at least we don’t have to define all the other comparison methods. But now we’re done, right?

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from unittest import TestCase
class Point3DTests(TestCase):

You know what? I’m done. 20 lines of code so far and we don’t even have a class that does anything; the hard part of this problem was supposed to be the quaternion solver, not “make a data structure which can be printed and compared”. I’m all in on piles of undocumented garbage tuples, lists, and dictionaries it is; defining proper data structures well is way too hard in Python.2


namedtuple to the (not really) rescue

The standard library’s answer to this conundrum is namedtuple. While a valiant first draft (it bears many similarities to my own somewhat embarrassing and antiquated entry in this genre) namedtuple is unfortunately unsalvageable. It exports a huge amount of undesirable public functionality which would be a huge compatibility nightmare to maintain, and it doesn’t address half the problems that one runs into. A full enumeration of its shortcomings would be tedious, but a few of the highlights:

  • Its fields are accessable as numbered indexes whether you want them to be or not. Among other things, this means you can’t have private attributes, because they’re expoed via the apparently public __getitem__ interface.
  • It compares equal to a raw tuple of the same values, so it’s easy to get into bizarre type confusion, especially if you’re trying to use it to migrate away from using tuples and lists.
  • It’s a tuple, so it’s always immutable. Sort of.

As to that last point, either you can use it like this:

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Point3D = namedtuple('Point3D', ['x', 'y', 'z'])

in which case it doesn’t look like a type in your code; simple syntax-analysis tools without special cases won’t recognize it as one. You can’t give it any other behaviors this way, since there’s nowhere to put a method. Not to mention the fact that you had to type the class’s name twice.

Alternately you can use inheritance and do this:

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class Point3D(namedtuple('_Point3DBase', 'x y z'.split()])):
    pass

This gives you a place you can put methods, and a docstring, and generally have it look like a class, which it is... but in return you now have a weird internal name (which, by the way, is what shows up in the repr, not the class’s actual name). However, you’ve also silently made the attributes not listed here mutable, a strange side-effect of adding the class declaration; that is, unless you add __slots__ = 'x y z'.split() to the class body, and then we’re just back to typing every attribute name twice.

And this doesn’t even mention the fact that science has proven that you shouldn’t use inheritance.

So, namedtuple can be an improvement if it’s all you’ve got, but only in some cases, and it has its own weird baggage.


Enter The attr

So here’s where my favorite mandatory Python library comes in.

Let’s re-examine the problem above. How do I make Point3D with attrs?

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import attr
@attr.s

Since this isn’t built into the language, we do have to have 2 lines of boilerplate to get us started: the import and the decorator saying we’re about to use it.

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import attr
@attr.s
class Point3D(object):

Look, no inheritance! By using a class decorator, Point remains a Plain Old Python Class (albeit with some helpful double-underscore methods tacked on, as we’ll see momentarily).

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import attr
@attr.s
class Point3D(object):
    x = attr.ib()

It has an attribute called x.

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import attr
@attr.s
class Point3D(object):
    x = attr.ib()
    y = attr.ib()
    z = attr.ib()

And one called y and one called z and we’re done.

We’re done? Wait. What about a nice string representation?

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>>> Point3D(1, 2, 3)
Point3D(x=1, y=2, z=3)

Comparison?

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>>> Point3D(1, 2, 3) == Point3D(1, 2, 3)
True
>>> Point3D(3, 2, 1) == Point3D(1, 2, 3)
False
>>> Point3D(3, 2, 3) > Point3D(1, 2, 3)
True

Okay sure but what if I want to extract the data defined in explicit attributes in a format appropriate for JSON serialization?

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>>> attr.asdict(Point3D(1, 2, 3))
{'y': 2, 'x': 1, 'z': 3}

Maybe that last one was a little on the nose. But nevertheless, it’s one of many things that becomes easier because attrs lets you declare the fields on your class, along with lots of potentially interesting metadata about them, and then get that metadata back out.

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>>> import pprint
>>> pprint.pprint(attr.fields(Point3D))
(Attribute(name='x', default=NOTHING, validator=None, repr=True, cmp=True, hash=True, init=True, convert=None),
 Attribute(name='y', default=NOTHING, validator=None, repr=True, cmp=True, hash=True, init=True, convert=None),
 Attribute(name='z', default=NOTHING, validator=None, repr=True, cmp=True, hash=True, init=True, convert=None))

I am not going to dive into every interesting feature of attrs here; you can read the documentation for that. Plus, it’s well-maintained, so new goodies show up every so often and I might miss something important. But attrs does a few key things that, once you have them, you realize that Python was sorely missing before:

  1. It lets you define types concisely, as opposed to the normally quite verbose manual def __init__.... Types without typing.
  2. It lets you say what you mean directly with a declaration rather than expressing it in a roundabout imperative recipe. Instead of “I have a type, it’s called MyType, it has a constructor, in the constructor I assign the property ‘A’ to the parameter ‘A’ (and so on)”, you say “I have a type, it’s called MyType, it has an attribute called a”, and behavior is derived from that fact, rather than having to later guess about the fact by reverse engineering it from behavior (for example, running dir on an instance, or looking at self.__class__.__dict__).
  3. It provides useful default behavior, as opposed to Python’s sometimes-useful but often-backwards defaults.
  4. It adds a place for you to put a more rigorous implementation later, while starting out simple.

Let’s explore that last point.

Progressive Enhancement

While I’m not going to talk about every feature, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of them. As you can see from those mile-long repr()s for Attribute above, there are a number of interesting ones.

For example: you can validate attributes when they are passed into an @attr.s-ified class. Our Point3D, for example, should probably contain numbers. For simplicity’s sake, we could say that that means instances of float, like so:

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import attr
from attr.validators import instance_of
@attr.s
class Point3D(object):
    x = attr.ib(validator=instance_of(float))
    y = attr.ib(validator=instance_of(int))
    z = attr.ib(validator=instance_of(int))

The fact that we were using attrs means we have a place to put this extra validation: we can just add type information to each attribute as we need it. Some of these facilities let us avoid other common mistakes. For example, this is a popular “spot the bug” Python interview question:

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class Bag:
    def __init__(self, contents=[]):
        self._contents = contents
    def add(self, something):
        self._contents.append(something)
    def get(self):
        return self.contents[:]

Fixing it, of course, becomes this:

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class Bag:
    def __init__(self, contents=None):
        if contents is None:
            contents = []
        self._contents = contents

adding two extra lines of code.

contents inadvertently becomes a global varible here, making all Bag objects not provided with a different list share the same list. With attrs this instead becomes:

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@attr.s
class Bag:
    _contents = attr.ib(default=attr.Factory(list))
    def add(self, something):
        self._contents.append(something)
    def get(self):
        return self.contents[:]

There are several other features that attrs provides you with opportunities to make your classes both more convenient and more correct. Another great example? If you want to be strict about extraneous attributes on your objects (or more memory-efficient on CPython), you can just pass slots=True at the class level - e.g. @attr.s(slots=True) - to automatically turn your existing attrs declarations a matching __slots__ attribute. All of these handy features allow you to make better and more powerful use of your attr.ib() declarations.


The Python Of The Future

Some people are excited about eventually being able to program in Python 3 everywhere. What I’m looking forward to is being able to program in Python-with-attrs everywhere. It exerts a subtle, but positive, design influence in all the codebases I’ve see it used in.

Give it a try: you may find yourself surprised at places where you’ll now use a tidily explained class, where previously you might have used a sparsely-documented tuple, list, or a dict, and endure the occasional confusion from co-maintainers. Now that it’s so easy to have structured types that clearly point in the direction of their purpose (in their __repr__, in their __doc__, or even just in the names of their attributes), you might find you’ll use a lot more of them. Your code will be better for it; I know mine has been.


  1. Scare quotes here because the attributes aren’t meaningfully exposed to the caller, they’re just named publicly. This pattern, getting rid of private methods entirely and having only private attributes, probably deserves its own post... 

  2. And we hadn’t even gotten to the really exciting stuff yet: type validation on construction, default mutable values... 

Syndicated 2016-08-12 09:47:00 from Deciphering Glyph

Remember that thing I said in my pycon talk about native packaging being the main thing to worry about, and single-file binaries being at best a stepping stone to that and at worst a bit of a red herring? You don’t have to take it from me. From the authors of a widely-distributed command-line application that was rewritten from Python into Go specifically for easier distribution, and then rewritten in Python:

... [the] majority of people prefer native packages so distributing precompiled binaries wasn’t a big win for this type of project1 ...

I don’t want to say “I told you so”, but... no. Wait a second. That is exactly what I want to do. That is what I am doing.

I told you so.

Syndicated 2016-08-12 03:37:00 from Deciphering Glyph

Hello lazyweb,

I want to run some “legacy” software (Trac, specifically) on a Swarm cluster. The files that it needs to store are mostly effectively write-once (it’s the attachments database) but may need to be deleted (spammers and purveyors of malware occasionally try to upload things for spamming or C&C) so while mutability is necessary, there’s a very low risk of any write contention.

I can’t use a networked filesystem, or any volume drivers, so no easy-mode solutions. Basically I want to be able to deploy this on any swarm cluster, so no cheating and fiddling with the host.

Is there any software that I can easily run as a daemon that runs in the background, synchronizing the directory of a data volume between N containers where N is the number of hosts in my cluster?

I found this but it strikes me as ... somehow wrong ... to use that as a critical part of my data-center infrastructure. Maybe it would actually be a good start? But in addition to not being really designed for this task, it’s also not open source, which makes me a little nervous. This list, or even this smaller one is huge and bewildering. So I was hoping you could drop me a line if you’ve got an idea what I could use for this.

Syndicated 2016-08-11 05:28:00 from Deciphering Glyph

I like keeping a comprehensive an accurate addressbook that includes all past email addresses for my contacts, including those which are no longer valid. I do this because I want to be able to see conversations stretching back over the years as originating from that person.

Unfortunately this causes problems when sending mail sometimes. On macOS, at least as of El Capitan, neither the Mail application nor the Contacts application have any mechanism for indicating preference-order of email addresses that I’ve been able to find. Compounding this annoyance, when completing a recipient’s address based on their name, it displays all email addresses for a contact without showing their label, which means even if I label one “preferred” or “USE THIS ONE NOW”, or “zzz don’t use this hasn’t worked since 2005”, I can’t tell when I’m sending a message.

But it seems as though it defaults to sending messages to the most recent outgoing address for that contact that it can see in an email. For people I send email to regularly to this is easy enough. For people who I’m aware have changed their email address, but where I don’t actually want to send them a message, I think I figured out a little hack that makes it work: make a new folder called “Preferred Addresses Hack” (or something suitably), compose a new message addressed to the correct address, then drag the message out of drafts into the folder; since it has a recent date and is addressed to the right person, Mail.app will index it and auto-complete the correct address in the future.

However, since the previous behavior appeared somewhat non-deterministic, I might be tricking myself into believing that this hack worked. If you can confirm it, I’d appreciate it if you would let me know.

Syndicated 2016-08-08 23:24:00 from Deciphering Glyph

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