Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Day 2 was pretty tough on my old hardware. Part 1 originally took 16 minutes, then I got it down to 9 seconds – only to realize later that my solution abused some properties of my particular input. A correct solution will probably take about 30 seconds. 🫤

Part 2 took 29 minutes this morning. I wrote an optimized version but haven’t tested it yet. I hope it’ll be under a minute.

Python 1 feels really slow, even compared to Java 1. And these first puzzles weren’t even computationally intensive. We’ll see how far I’ll make it …

https://movq.de/v/f831d98103/day02.jpg

Thinking about doing Advent of Code in my own tiny language mu this year.

mu is:

• Dynamically typed
  
• Lexically scoped with closures
  
• Has a Go-like curly-brace syntax
  
• Built around lists, maps, and first-class functions
  

Key syntax:

• Functions use fn and braces:
  

fn add(a, b) {
    return a + b
}

• Variables use := for declaration and = for assignment:
  

x := 10
x = x + 1

• Control flow includes if / else and while:
  

if x > 5 {
    println("big")
} else {
    println("small")
}

while x < 10 {
    x = x + 1
}

• Lists and maps:
  

nums := [1, 2, 3]
nums[1] = 42

ages := {"alice": 30, "bob": 25}
ages["bob"] = ages["bob"] + 1

Supported types:

• int
  
• bool
  
• string
  
• list
  
• map
  
• fn
  
• nil
  

mu feels like a tiny little Go-ish, Python-ish language — curious to see how far I can get with it for Advent of Code this year. 🎄

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].

After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?

Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.

But that was it. All test green. \o/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I now remember having similar problems back then. I’m pretty sure I typically consulted the Qt C++ documentation and only very rarely looked at the Python one. It was easy enough to translate the C++ code to Python.

Yeah, the GIL can be problematic at times. I’m glad it wasn’t an issue for my application.

FTR, I see one (two) issues with PyQt6, sadly:

1. The PyQt6 docs appear to be mostly auto-generated from the C++ docs. And they contain many errors or broken examples (due to the auto-conversion). I found this relatively unpleasent to work with.
   
2. (Until Python finally gets rid of the Global Interpreter Lock properly, it’s not really suited for GUI programs anyway – in my opinion. You can’t offload anything to a second thread, because the whole program is still single-threaded. This would have made my fractal rendering program impossible, for example.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmmmmmmmmmmmm … guess I should take a look at Qt. 🤔 That’s the one popular toolkit that I’ve never really tried for some reason. I really don’t like C++ (might as well use Rust), so I’ll also use Python.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Don’t you worry, this was meant as a joke. :-D

There was a time when I thought that Swing was actually really good. But having done some Qt/KDE later, I realized how much better that was. That were the late KDE 3 and early KDE 4 days, though. Not sure how it is today. But back then it felt Trolltech and the KDE folks put a hell lot more thought into their stuff. I was pleasantly surprised how natural it appeared and all the bits played together. Sure, there were the odd ends, but the overall design was a lot better in my opinion.

To be fair, I never used it from C++, always the Python bindings, which were considerably more comfortable (just alone the possibility to specify most attributes right away as kwargs in the constructor instead of calling tons of setters). And QtJambi, the Java binding, was also relatively nice. I never did a real project though, just played around with the latter.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (… I am making a Zalgo Generator in Python right now, because I need it for something else … 🤣)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I was always under the wrong impression that Tkinter is bundled with Python.

It should be. Maybe your distro splits it off. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I never programmed with Tkinter myself and it’s been ages that I ran a program which used it. I always thought that it looks awful. But maybe there are nicer themes these days. I just wanted to give the demo python3 -m tkinter a try, but this module doesn’t exist. I was always under the wrong impression that Tkinter is bundled with Python.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Xfce is nice, but it’s also mostly GTK. I don’t really know the answer yet. For now, I’ll just avoid anything that uses GTK4.

For my own programs, I might have a closer look at Tkinter. I was complaining recently that I couldn’t find a good file manager, so it might be an interesting excercise to write one in Python+Tkinter. 🤔 (Or maybe that’s too much work, I don’t know yet.)

I have a Python script that transforms the original YouTube channel Atom feed into a more useful Atom feed by removing the spam description and replacing it with the video duration, filtering out videos by title, duration, etc. I just updated it to exclude the damn Shorts garbage more efficiently. Finally, YouTube updated their Atom feed generation, so that the video URL contains /short/ if it’s of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’d love to have a Python script pushing my local CSV, too. But that’s never gonna fly, not in a thousand years. I can’t imagine that ever becoming reasonably stable without having to fix everything after the reverse-engineered API changes again.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net interesting that ruby is so low on the list, i find it the easiest to learn! hell i struggle with python more than ruby and i’ve been told that python is like ruby but better lol. maybe it’s just my weird brain!

One of the nicest things about Go is the language itself, comparing Go to other popular languages in terms of the complexity to learn to be proficient in:

• Go: 25 keywords (Stack Overflow); CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)
  
• Python 2: 30 keywords (TutorialsPoint); GIL-bound threads & multiprocessing (Wikipedia)
  
• Python 3: 35 keywords (Initial Commit); GIL-bound threads, asyncio & multiprocessing (Wikipedia, DEV Community)
  
• Java: 50 keywords (Stack Overflow); threads + java.util.concurrent (Wikipedia)
  
• C++: 82 keywords (Stack Overflow); std::thread, atomics & futures (en.cppreference.com)
  
• JavaScript: 38 keywords (Stack Overflow); single-threaded event loop & async/await, Web Workers (Wikipedia)
  
• Ruby: 42 keywords (Stack Overflow); GIL-bound threads (MRI), fibers & processes (Wikipedia)
  

@bender@twtxt.net Here’s a short-list:

• Simple, minimal syntax—master the core in hours, not months.
  
• CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)—safe, scalable parallelism.
  
• Blazing-fast compiler & single-binary deploys—zero runtime dependencies.
  
• Rich stdlib & built-in tooling (gofmt, go test, modules).
  
• No heavy frameworks or hidden magic—unlike Java/C++/Python overhead.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @prologic@twtxt.net Given that all these programs are super old (tar is from the late 1970ies), while trying to retain backwards-compatibilty, I’m not surprised that the UI isn’t too great. 🤔

find has quite a few pitfalls, that is very true. At work, we don’t even use it anymore in more complex scenarios but write Python scripts instead. find can be fast and efficient, but fewer and fewer people lack the knowledge to use it … The same goes for Shell scripting in general, actually.

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! That seems to be much easier. It’s already implemented in the Python docs as examples of recvmsg(…) and sendmsg(…):

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/socket.html#socket.socket.recvmsg
  
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/socket.html#socket.socket.sendmsg
  

I looked at them sooo many times in order to figure out why my SCM_CREDENTIALS sending code didn’t work. :-D

Nobody want to be a shitty programmer. The question is: Do you do anything not to not be one?
Reading blogs or social media and watching YouTube videos is fun. After them, your code may be a little better, of course. But you need a lot. You need to study! Read good books and study the code of other programmers, for example. Maybe work with a new language, architectures and paradigms. You need break the routine.

If you know Object-oriented programming, you learn functional programming.
If you know Model-View-Controller, you learn Model-View-ViewModel.
If you don’t know anything about architectures, you learn Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, etc.
If you know Python, you learn Ruby or Go.
If you know Clojure or Lisp… you don’t need to learn anything else. You are already a good programmer. Just kidding. You can learn Elixir or Scala.

Be a good programmer my friend.

We’re all old farts. When we started, there weren’t a lot of options. But today? I’d be completely overwhelmed, I think.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice

That’s what I usually do (when we have young people at work who never really programmed before), but it doesn’t really “hit” them. They’ve seen so much, crazy graphics, web pages, it’s all fancy. Just some text output is utterly boring these days. ☹️ And that’s my problem: I have no idea how I could possibly spark some interest in things like pointers or something “low-level” like that. And I truly believe that you need to understand things like pointers in order to program, in general.

Wrote some serious Python for the first time in like 10 years 😱 I feel so dirty 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I started with Delphi in school, the book (that we never ever used even once and I also never looked at) taught Pascal. The UI part felt easy at first but prevented me from understanding fundamental stuff like procedures or functions or even begin and end blocks for ifs or loops. For example I always thought that I needed to have a button somewhere, even if hidden. That gave me a handler procedure where I could put code and somehow call it. Two or three years later, a new mate from the parallel class finally told me that this wasn’t necessary and how to do thing better.

You know all too well that back in the day there was not a whole lot of information out there. And the bits that did exist were well hidden. At least from me. Eventually discovering planet-quellcodes.de (I don’t remember if that was the original forum or if that got split off from some other board) via my best schoolmate was like finding the Amber Room. Yeah, reading the ITG book would have been a very good idea for sure. :-)

In hindsight, a console program without the UI overhead might have been better. At least for the very start. Much less things to worry about or get lost.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice, it doesn’t require a lot of surrounding boilerplate like, say Java or Go. It also does exceptionally well in the principle of least surprise.

nuevos projectos! algunos en python otros en simple html!!

Show HN: Durable Python Workflows
Comments ⌘ Read more

Exciting new for Python 3.14!
t-string, not to be confused with f-string, to avoid malicious code and make life easier for web developers.
https://davepeck.org/2025/04/11/pythons-new-t-strings/
#python

@eaplme@eapl.me you wrote:

“That PHP snippet could be merged into https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html”

Why, though? AFAIK @andros@twtxt.andros.dev’s client is on Emacs, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s is on Python (and Golang, for tt2), @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s is on Python, and @prologic@twtxt.net’s is on Golang. All the client creator needs to know is in the documentation already, coding language agnostic.

Scratch that, no bug in jenny. There’s actually a test case for this. Python normalizes -00:00 to +00:00, so the negative case never happens.

Whenever – typed and DST-safe datetimes for Python
Comments ⌘ Read more

Elliptical Python programming
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. ↫ Susam Pal I can’t program and know nothing about Python, but this still made me laugh. ⌘ Read more

PEP 750 – Template Strings has been accepted
Comments ⌘ Read more

Plain – a web framework for building products with Python
Comments ⌘ Read more

Architecture Patterns with Python
Comments ⌘ Read more

Thank you @python_valencia@twtxt.python-valencia.es for letting me show you the secrets of a decentralised plain text social network like twtxt.
I hope you enjoyed the talk! ❤️🐍


#python #twtxt

I want to present the twtxt feed from Python Valencia: https://twtxt.python-valencia.es/
Technical curiosity: It is generated using n8n, using the official rss.
#welcome

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python’s pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn’t contain anything else, it’s a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o

I now subscribed to most feeds in my Go tt reimplementation that I already followed with the old Python tt. Previously, I just had a few feeds for testing purposes in my new config. While transfering, I “dropped” heaps of feeds that appeared to be inactive.

This might motivate me to actually “finish” the new client, so that it could become my daily driver. No need to use the old software stack any longer. Let’s see how bad this goes.

Activeloop (YC S18) Is Hiring Senior Python Back End and AI Search Engineers
Comments ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

• KMail – e-mail client
  
• Okular – PDF viewer
  
• Gwenview – image viewer
  
• Dolphin – file browser
  
• KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don’t get it.)
  
• KPatience – card game
  
• Kdenlive – video editor
  
• Kleopatra – certificate manager
  

Qt:

• VLC – video player
  
• Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don’t remember.)
  
• sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser
  

Gtk:

• Firefox – web browser
  
• Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can’t remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
  
• Audacity – audio editor
  
• GIMP – image editor
  

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn’t have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I’d definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)

I have finished 1-9 on Python. If anyone is interested, I could share the code, or in Reddit many people have shared theirs.

In a couple of days I’ll be giving a talk about #twtxt https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/python-valencia-meetup/events/306769708/

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev If something fits in a CSV file, it typically doesn’t require a database. I agree with that. Depending on the application, more complicated queries might benefit from a database, though. I don’t know awk very well, but I could imagine that grep, sed and cut reach their CSV processing limits rather quickly when you have to deal with escaped (multiline) fields.

I only very rarely have to deal with CSV files or databases in my day to day life. Maybe, these classic Unix tools offer some tricks I’m not aware of. When I have some more complicated CSV input, I generally reach for Python.

looks good now!
description = 🏗 Full-Stack developer (Mainly Python) ✍ Writer[...]

I’m developing a tutorial for the Django Girls. Does anyone here have experience with #Django ? #python

The project is a POC (Proof of Concept) that went into production and the company has customers who are using it. The developers had been working for several years, without testing, structure, isolation and so on. The company hired me to transform the project into a real product. There are in my hands 422 python files to transform that they beg me a refactore, architecture and testing. Every developer’s bad dream.
My first step is to read and understand the tree because there are apps inside other apps call each other. I am very determined to work on a new repository.

@prologic@twtxt.net Which one? I don’t mind the ternary operator at all. In fact, I often find myself missing it in Go. I don’t find the two alternatives particularly elegant:

foo := "eggs"
if bar {
    foo = "spam"
}

Or:

var foo string
if bar {
    foo = "spam"
} else {
    foo = "eggs"
}

To my eye, this just would look a lot nicer:

foo := bar ? "spam" : "eggs"

Or at least as the Pythons do it:

foo = "spam" if bar else "eggs"

The ternary operator especially shines with relatively short expressions.