Python:

Python:

Here is a pretty interesting and weird talk on Python. David Beazley is a python guru (e.g. Python Cookbook3).

And here he describes his role as an expert witness on the plaintiff side on a copyright case. This is interesting in light of John Carmack's recent blog post on his underwhelming experience with Zenimax's expert witness.

Here is the summary if you are pressed for time:

There is a massive *code base* of 1.5 tera bytes. Code. Not binaries. Code. That spans 20 years. The plaintiff is saying somewhere in there is shit copied. Beazley's job is to support that.

The defense is some tech megacorp that delivers some sort of massive legacy systems. He doesn't say who it is. But it is a system that spans dedicated embedded hardware to mainframes and microcomputers.

The defense shit vomits up everything without any indexing, finding guide, nothing. Right? Plaintiff, go choke on this and fuck yourself.

As the expert, he is the only one allowed into a vault with the Defense's entire source code.

He is given (1) printer and (1) PC compatible computer with Visual Studio. His job is to do software archeology and figure out how the defense's shit works. Now understand this is crap written over 20 years across hundreds of programmers. It is easy to say that *no one human* has ever understood this body of code.

But it is *his* job to be the first.

On a lark he tried:

C:\ python

Python was there!

Somehow the vendor of the PC left python there.

Over a course of months he builds an amazing set of tools in Python to understand this mass of software.

He literally created a c & c++ linker in Python...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8

Originally posted on Facebook on February 03, 2017.