Slides from My Talk at Name Collision

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending the Name Collision hackathon in Warsaw. I haven’t actually taken part in the competition but I served as a mentor, trying to help the teams get stuff done as much I could. It was really fun experience.

Before that, though, I gave a short lightning talk about the Git version control systems. I showed a few (hopefully) lesser known tricks that may prove useful both in everyday workflow and in some exceptional situations.
The slides from this talk are available here. They might be a bit uninformative on their own but I suppose the liberal use of memes can make up for this somewhat ;-)

The “Wat” of Python

It is quite likely you are familiar with the Wat talk by Gary Bernhardt. It is sweeping through the Internet, giving some good laugh to pretty much anyone who watches it. Surely it did to me!
The speaker is making fun of Ruby and JavaScript languages (although mostly the latter, really), showing totally unexpected and baffling results of some seemingly trivial operations – like adding two arrays. It turns out that in JavaScript, the result is an empty string. (And the reasons for that provoke even bigger “wat”).

After watching the talk for about five times (it hardly gets old), I started to wonder whether it is only those two languages that exhibit similarly confusing behavior… The answer is of course “No”, and that should be glaringly obvious to anyone who knows at least a bit of C++ ;) But beating on that horse would be way too easy, so I’d rather try something more ambitious.
Hence I ventured forth to search for “wat” in Python 2.x. The journey wasn’t short enough to stop at mere addition operator but nevertheless – and despite me being nowhere near Python expert – I managed to find some candidates rather quickly.

I strove to keep with the original spirit of Gary’s talk, so I only included those quirks that can be easily shown in interactive interpreter. The final result consists of three of them, arranged in the order of increasing puzzlement. They are given without explanation or rationale, hopefully to encourage some thought beyond amusement :)

Behold, then, the Wat of Python!