The Dollar Sign Before Variable

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The dollar was invented for that purpose because the very earliest shells had a notion of scripting, but they did not have a notion of parameterizing the scripting. By the time scripting was slightly more mature than the very first script, there was a convention that just like the first word on the line is the name of the program, the following words could be names of files. The flip side of that is forcing the strictness onto the beginning programmer to teach them that programming is values and attention to details.

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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:26) – CPython
(12:38) – Code readability
(17:00) – Indentation
(33:36) – Bugs
(45:04) – Programming fads
(1:00:15) – Speed of Python 3.11
(1:25:09) – Type hinting
(1:30:27) – mypy
(1:35:43) – TypeScript vs JavaScript
(1:51:42) – Best IDE for Python
(2:01:43) – Parallelism
(2:19:36) – Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)
(2:29:14) – Python 4.0
(2:41:31) – Machine learning
(2:51:13) – Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)
(3:02:49) – Advice for beginners
(3:09:21) – GitHub Copilot
(3:12:47) – Future of Python