There should be more than one way to do it in Python

2012-01-23T20:08:39+00:00

Python has a philosophy of ‘There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it’ (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/) rather then Perl’s ‘There’s more than one way to do it’ (Programming Perl Third Edition, Larry Wall et al.). This is great, in theory – it leads to greater consistency between disparate programs and makes it easier for individual programmers to pick up someone else’s code.

The problem comes where the obvious way is not, for whatever reason, the practical way. For example, the obvious way to test if a string begins with another string is to use "string1".startswith("string2"). This is, however, significantly less performant than doing "string1"[7:] == "string2" which means when doing a large number of these tests you have to use this form, despite it not being the obvious method.

Unless you are familiar with Python’s sequence slicing syntax (http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#typesseq) I do not find "string1"[7:] to be obvious (even though I would expect most programmers to be able to hazard a, probably correct, guess to what it does), which means I would precede that line with a # Check if string1 starts with "string2". When I feel the need to comment on a specific line of code it is usually because I do not think what it is doing is sufficiently obvious, which means it violates Python’s ‘There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it’.

Must see Steve Carell

2012-01-16T21:58:00+00:00

Since the early 1980s NBC has running a block of comedy programming on Thursday nights. This quickly became a ratings boon for the network, with shows such as The Cosby Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, ER and Friends actually being the #1 most watched TV show for their season. There's an inherent synergy between scheduling programs like this in a block, because you get a viewership boost from the previous show. That's right, people are actually too lazy to change the channel if there's something similar on.

At its mid 90s peak the 'Must see TV' block regularly had 2 or 3 of the top 5 rated programs on television. In the late 90s and early 2000s however, the strategy began to fail somewhat - Seinfeld, Frasier and Friends all finished their runs. Joey was a major flop and many of the shows launched during 2004/5 failed to catch on. Fortunately for NBC they turned things around as the noughties wore on, launching acclaimed comedy shows such as 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Community and, ignoring season 1, The US Office.

The Office was the linchpin of this comedy block, with the highest ratings and Steve Carell being one of the most visible stars on US TV. Unfortunately he quit the series at the end of the last season. I was interested in figuring out what the impact of this would be on ratings, so I've calculated the difference in average ratings between the last full season of a show before steve Carell left, and the 1/2 season shown so far. Since 30 Rock has only had 1 episode since its return, I've chosen the equivalently placed episode (first spring season episode) from the previous season. The viewing figures are listed in millions.

	Community	Parks and Recreation	The Office	30 Rock
Before:	4.48	5.1	7.7	5.34
After:	3.67	3.93	6.07	4.47
Change	-17.97%	-22.96%	-21.16%	-16.29%

As you can see there's a pretty significant drop in ratings across all four shows. What's interesting is that P&R has a larger drop than the Office itself, whether that's due to other factors, or simply because P&R had less viewers to begin with is open to debate. I have no data either way.

This is somewhat relevant because Community has already been put on hiatus, with an assumption by its fanbase that it will lead to cancellation. Parks and Recreation has very similar viewing figures, leading to concerns that it might be cancelled as well. I'd have thought 30 Rock's acclaim being higher than the other two would lead to it continuing a little longer, but it is approaching dangerous territory ratings wise as well.

There are no longer any Thursday night NBC comedy shows within the top 50 most popular US TV Shows.

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There should be more than one way to do it in Python

Must see Steve Carell