Where there is a Will

Santa Claus. Naughty or Nice? Is Santa a symbol of giving who brings joy to millions or an evil corporate shill who promotes shameless materialism?

Award extra points for arguments that are venomous and vitriolic. We don’t want no apologists in this debate!

Peanut butter. Its loaded with calories, but absolutely delicious and goes well with with jelly. But which is better: crunchy or smooth?

Extra points will be awarded for arguments that involve religion or politics! Voters - if an argument skillfully brings up the topic of the Iraq war, give it an extra point!

Just read an interesting blog post about comparing Python and Haskell code to calculate the Fibonacci sequence. I wrote a faster version, just for the hell of it. I realise that it is not a fair comparison any more, and doesn’t prove anything, but it does demonstrate a useful optimization technique. Here’s the code…

from time import time
 
def memoize(f):
    f._cache = {}
    def do_f(n):
        if n in f._cache:
            return f._cache[n]
        r = f(n)
        f._cache[n] = r
        return r
    return do_f
 
@memoize
def fib(n):
   if n == 0 or n == 1:
      return n
   else:
      return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    start_time = time()
    for i in range(36):
        print "n=%d => %d" % (i, fib(i))
 
    print "Time elapsed: %f" % (time() - start_time)

When I run it on my machine, it claims to take 0.00000 seconds. Damn, thats fast!

My employer has placed a number of bounties for wxPython features. Pays cash!

wxPython Bounties