Project: Groups, forks and setup

• Groups formed in the issue feeds.
• Forks were created.
• Any further questions related to GitHub or the setup?

Learning objectives

• Familiarize yourself with Python syntax.
• Learn good debugging and development practices.
• Understand how to extend a Python package (CoLRev).

Information on this session

• Form groups of three to four participants to collaborate on the tasks, solve them together, and engage in meaningful discussions about your solutions.
• Over the course of two sessions, we will focus on refining a single module using the colrev run command, progressively enhancing it with each iteration.

Start the Codespace

Open the Notebook:

Start the Codespace in the tutorial_python branch of the CoLRev upstream repository.

The setup can run in the background while we focus on the concepts.

Python

• Supports multiple paradigms: object-oriented, procedural, or functional.
• Python is an interpreted language: no need to compile (build jars) before running.
• Uses indentation instead of brackets to separate blocks (such as if statements).
• Is strongly and dynamically typed.
• Provides access to many packages on PyPI, covering machine learning, data science, web scraping, etc.
• Python is actively developed, with new versions introducing changes in functionality and old versions no longer receiving security updates:
  • Python 3.6 (2016): Introduction of f-strings
  • Python 3.7 (2018): Dictionaries are now ordered
  • ...

What we will learn in the Python session(s)

Writing and running Python code

Python packages

Best practices

• Carefully read tutorials, vignettes, and code examples (e.g., on GitHub).
• Start with small code segments, test whether they work, and extend them.
• Add or commit working code frequently.
• Use code linters to ensure high code quality (run pre-commit run --all).
• To debug code, check whether variables have the expected values (use assert or print statements).
• When exceptions are thrown, read the traceback:

Next steps

• Read the package development documentation.
• Study the code of related CoLRev packages.
• Take notes on the CoLRev objects or libraries that will be needed.
• Remember to stop the Codespace (Codespaces overview).

Note: These tutorials may be helpful to continue practicing Python.