Plurrrr

Every programming language aims to be performant in its niche and achieving superior performance requires a lot of compiler level optimizations. One famous optimization technique is Constant Folding where during compile time the engine tries to recognize constant expressions, evaluate them, and replaces the expression with this newly evaluated value, making the runtime leaner.

In this essay, we dive deep and find what exactly is Constant Folding, understand the scope of it in the world of Python and finally go through Python's source code - CPython - and find out how elegantly Python actually implements it.

The infamous Monad is well known for it’s confusing name and countless useless tutorials. I won’t attempt to explain what it is here, but to explain why it is useful to have it available as an abstraction. One common objection to Monads is that, while they do seem to capture a shared interface and abstraction, it’s hard to see what benefit is derived from using Monads. In Haskell, it’s easy enough to say that the do-notation syntactic sugar requires the Monad interface and no more, but why are some people so intent on getting Monads working in Rust, OCaml, and even Java and Python?

Let's say you needed to document all of the tables in your PostgreSQL database. You wanted the output of the “\d“ psql meta-command for all of the tables so you could put it in a shared documentation area. However, there were a lot of tables and you did not want to have to type all the commands that you needed.