Outside The Asylum

I am a cynical conservative.  And as much as I had problems with Pope Francis's narrow left wing vision of synodality, I believe Pope Leo XIV has six amazing opportunities to heal the Church. 1.  His first Apostolic visit should be to Peru to feed the poor directly in the diocese that he was a missionary, back in 1988.  And say a Mass in Incan, televised worldwide!   Return to Chiclayo for a dinner of Peruvian Ceviche! 2.  On the same trip His 2nd Apostolic visit should be to a local police station to give a PUBLIC statement of all he knows of the Fr. Gonzales mess, and visit again with Fr. Gonzales' victims.  He should do this out of true mercy for the soul of Fr. Gonzales and as a sign we have turned the corner on the clerical abuse scandals.  He should do this as an example to all prelates and Bishops and priors and abbots and anybody else who has oversight of this problem in the world. 3.  Next visit should be to Chicago to take in a Whi...

 A simple question on Boot.dev about design considerations for a language feature, turned into a fascinating conversation on software engineering in general.  I post it here for posterity. Is function overloading with different data types available in python? Ah, a great question, curious coder! Python does not support traditional function overloading like some other languages such as C++ or Java. In those languages, you can define multiple functions with the same name, distinguished by their parameter types. However, Python functions are dynamically typed and defined only once. Instead, in Python, a single function can handle many different data types by using techniques like: Type checking inside the function : You can check the type of arguments using  isinstance()  or  type() . Default arguments or variable-length arguments : Using  *args  or  **kwargs , a function can accept a flexible number of positional and keyword arguments. For example:...