#392: Data Science from the Command Line Transcript

00:00 When you think of data science, Jupyter Notebooks and associated tools probably come to mind.

00:04 But I want to broaden your tool set a bit and encourage you to look around at other tools that

00:09 are literally at your fingertips, the Terminal and the Shell command line tools. On this episode,

00:14 you'll meet Joran Janssen, who wrote the book Data Science on the Command Line. And there are a bunch

00:19 of fun and useful small utilities that will make your life simpler that you can run immediately in

00:25 the terminal. For example, you can query a CSV file with SQL right on the command line.

00:30 That and much more on this episode 392 of Talk Python to Me, recorded November 28th, 2022.

00:50 Welcome to Talk Python to Me, a weekly podcast on Python. This is your host, Michael Kennedy.

00:55 Follow me on Mastodon, where I'm @mkennedy and follow the podcast using @talkpython,

01:01 both on fosstodon.org. Be careful with impersonating accounts on other instances. There are many.

01:07 Keep up with the show and listen to over seven years of past episodes at talkpython.fm.

01:12 We've started streaming most of our episodes live on YouTube. Subscribe to our YouTube channel over

01:17 at talkpython.fm/youtube to get notified about upcoming shows and be part of that episode.

01:23 This episode is sponsored by Sentry. Don't let those errors go unnoticed. Use Sentry. Get started

01:30 at talkpython.fm/sentry. And it's brought to you by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.

01:36 Check them out at talkpython.fm/foundershub to get early support for your startup.

01:42 Transcripts for this episode are sponsored by Assembly AI, the API platform for state-of-the-art

01:48 AI models that automatically transcribe and understand audio data at a large scale. To learn more,

01:54 visit talkpython.fm/assemblyai.

01:57 Yerun, welcome to Talk Python to Me.

01:59 Hey, thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

02:02 I saw your book and the title was Data Science at the Command Line. I thought, okay, that's

02:08 different. You know, there's a lot of people that talk about data science tools and Jupyter

02:12 Labs, amazing. And like, if you look over the fence, like our studio and those kinds of things.

02:17 And yet, so much of what we can kind of do and orchestrate and create as a building block

02:22 happens in the terminal. And bringing some of these data science ideas and some of these

02:28 concepts from the terminal to support data scientists, I think is a really cool idea. So

02:32 we're going to have a great time talking about it.

02:33 Yeah. Yeah. I love to talk about this. And yeah, you're right. I still find it an interesting

02:38 juxtaposition of these two terms, data science and the command line. One being, well, nowadays,

02:45 let's say 10 years old, at least the term is. And the other one, the command line is over 50 years old.

02:51 The command line is, it's ancient in computer terms, right? It's one of the absolute very first

02:58 ways of interacting with computers. You've got cards where you programmed on paper,

03:03 and then you had the shell, right? Right after that.

03:06 Exactly. Before there were any screens, really.

03:08 Yeah. When we all, when computers were green, they were all green. It was amazing. So I'm looking

03:13 forward to diving into that. And it's going to be a lot of fun. And I just want to also put out there

03:18 for people who are like, but I'm not a data scientist. So should I check out? I actually

03:22 think there's a ton of cool ideas in there from just for people who do all sorts of Python and other

03:28 types of programming. It's not just data scientists, right?

03:31 No, absolutely. And I mean, even, I mean, I don't really care much for titles, but even when you're

03:38 an engineer or a developer, you would be surprised if you really think about how much data you actually

03:45 work with. I mean, just log files on the server. Yeah.

03:49 That's data too. So there are still a lot of opportunities to use the command line, even if

03:56 you don't consider yourself to be a data scientist per se.

04:00 Yeah, I totally agree. All right. Let's start with your story. How'd you get into programming

04:04 and data science and Python? I know you do Python and R and some other things. So how'd you get into

04:10 programming? Yeah, it actually started when I was about 12 years old. We got this old computer. It

04:18 was already old by then, 286. And I opened up this program. I wanted to write a story. And I was just

04:27 typing. I was journaling. Then I got all these error messages. Turns out the program that I had opened

04:33 was QBasic. And I didn't really like what I had to say. And then I started reading the help. And then

04:41 I realized like, hey, I can make this computer do things. It just needs a particular language.

04:47 And that's really how I got into programming. Yeah. And then of course, there's a whole range of

04:53 programming languages that then come by. Visual Basic at a certain point. Pascal, Java, C.

05:01 And you know what? I've forgotten most of it. So if this sounds intimidating,

05:06 please don't worry. But yeah, nowadays, Python plays a big role in my professional career. Also R,

05:14 right? And those two happen to be the most popular programming languages for doing data science and

05:21 JavaScript, obviously, when you're doing some more front-end work.

05:24 JavaScript finds its ways into all these little cracks. You're like, why JavaScript? Come on. I was

05:29 just looking at programmable dynamic DNS as a service. And the way you program it is you, I know,

05:36 and you jam in little bits of JavaScript to make a decision on how to like route a DNS query. I'm like,

05:41 JavaScript.

05:42 Oh, yeah. I'm now using Eleventy, which is a static site generator. And ironically enough,

05:50 it uses JavaScript.

05:51 Yeah, sure.

05:52 So yeah.

05:53 That's fantastic. I've heard really good things about Eleventy. And I just started using Hugo,

05:58 which is also a static site generator, but that one's written in Go. And I just decided I care

06:03 about writing in Markdown and I want a static site. And I don't care as long as I run a command on the

06:07 terminal. Actually, I want to tell the story a little bit about sort of coordinating over the

06:12 shell for some of these static site things. But I decided I don't care if it's the guts of it are in

06:17 a language that I can program. It's a tool. If it's a good tool for me, I'm going to use it.

06:21 Okay. So that's how you got into programming. How about day to day? What are you doing these days?

06:25 Yeah. So at this very moment, as we're recording this, I have my own company called Data Science

06:32 Workshops, where I give training at companies to developers and researchers and occasionally managers.

06:39 But I have decided to stop with that. Okay. So in a couple of weeks, I'll actually join another company.

06:47 So in the past six years, I have, we can talk about how that company came about. And it's probably

06:53 related to, it's related to everything, of course. But, but I just want to say that this is actually the

06:59 very first time that I'm talking about this, but I'm going to be a machine learning engineer.

07:05 Okay. Two reasons why I decided to, to stop with, with my own company is that first of all, I really

07:11 miss working with people, working with colleagues. Yeah. And secondly, I miss building things. So

07:18 that's why I'm, I'm joining, well, January 1st, I'm joining Xomnia, a consultancy based in Amsterdam,

07:25 the Netherlands. Excellent. Well, that sounds, that sounds really fun. I also run my own company and I'd

07:31 really enjoy it, but I completely get what you're saying. It's sometimes it's nice to be with a team

07:37 and you also, it makes you learn different skills or hone different skills to show up at a client

07:43 company where they've got, you know, a million requests in an hour trying to answer something,

07:48 which machine learning versus, you know, doing some research and talking about how to improve the

07:53 shell, right? These are very, two very different jobs. And so it's, it's cool to sort of mix,

07:57 mix up the career across those. Say again? It's great to mix up your career and do,

08:01 do some of both, right? Because if all you do is work at a consultant, you'd be like,

08:04 I can't wait to start my own company and do something else. Right, right, right. And you know,

08:08 the company was just, just happened. That's actually thanks to the book that I wrote a long time ago.

08:14 I, once it was done, the first edition that is in 2014, and we're talking about data science at the

08:21 command line here, I was asked to give a workshop and I'd never given a workshop before, but I was asked by,

08:27 a games company in Barcelona to give a one day workshop. And I liked it. And I liked it so much

08:34 that I started doing this more often. Yeah. So I decided to do this full time. So I didn't choose

08:39 the company life, the startup life. Although you can't really think of it as a startup, but yeah.

08:46 Yeah, sure. Yeah. These things happen.

08:47 The independent, the independent life. That's right.

08:49 Yeah, exactly.

08:50 Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, let's talk about the terminal. People on Windows might know it as the

08:56 command prompt. Although you, as I would also recommend that people generally stay away from

09:01 the command prompt in, at least for some of these tools, but we do have the Windows terminal,

09:07 which is relatively new and much, much nicer, much, much closer to the way Mac.

09:13 Yeah. Well, there's the PowerShell, but then there's also a new Windows terminal application.

09:20 And then it can even do things like bash into Windows subsystem for Linux, right? So if you

09:26 wanted to use some of these tools, you could fire up Windows subsystem for Linux, and then you would

09:29 literally have the same tool chain because it's just Ubuntu or something.

09:32 Oh, right. Yeah. I mean, I have, I'm familiar with WSL, but I haven't tried out this new Windows.

09:39 Yeah. The new Windows terminal is pretty nice. Well, let me see if I can pull it up for everybody.

09:44 Windows terminal, but yeah, it's just in the, the Windows 11 store, I guess you call it. I don't

09:50 know, but it's, it's a lot closer to a lot closer to the other tools. So if you're on Windows,

09:55 you owe it to yourself to not use cmd.exe, but get this instead. So what I want to talk about just

10:02 real quickly to set the stage is I just went through a period of, oh, my computer has been

10:09 the same setup for a couple of years. It's getting crufty. I'm going to just format it,

10:13 not restore from some backup, but format it and reset up everything. So it's completely fresh and

10:19 like better. Cause I really made some mistakes when I first set it up. Now it's better, but I opened up

10:24 the terminal and it's this tiny font, dreadful white background with white, with black text. And

10:30 it has some old version of bash. And so I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on like,

10:36 what do you do to make your terminal better? Right. You probably do something. You probably

10:42 install some extras and other things to make your experience on the terminal nicer.

10:47 Yeah. I'm guessing you're on macOS then? Yes. I do macOS and I do a Linux for the servers.

10:53 And I think some combination thereof is pretty common for most of the listeners.

10:58 So for macOS, the biggest gain you get when you install iTerm. Okay. A different terminal,

11:05 right? The application that would launch your shell.

11:08 The macOS term. Yeah. The terminal emulator. I, what do they call it? The macOS terminal replacement.

11:15 Yeah. This is, I'd say the most popular one on macOS. There are others, but yeah, that's what I start

11:22 with. You mentioned the shell, which is it still bash? Is that still the default one on macOS?

11:28 Yeah. It's still bash by default. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's an old version of bash.

11:32 So yeah, there are other shells out there. The Z shell is quite popular, largely compatible with bash.

11:40 I've heard good things about fish. Yes. Fish is good. Yeah. Yeah. Which actually it's not really

11:47 POSIX compliant as they say. So, so it's quite different from what you might get from bash or the

11:54 Z shell. But from what I've seen, the syntax, especially a looping might appeal to the Python

12:01 developer out there. It's closer to Python, but I haven't tried it myself.

12:06 There's also the conch shell. Is that how you say it? X-O-N dot. If you're willing to give up

12:13 POSIX, then this is like literally Python in the shell. You can just type like import JSON and do a

12:19 for loop, right? Yeah.

12:21 I've never, I've not gone this far. I'm still, I'm on the Z shell side of things. I really like how that

12:26 works. But if you really wanted to embrace the sort of Python in the shell.

12:30 Exactly. It's this trade-off of how far do you want to go? How much do you, do you want to deviate from

12:37 what is then considered to be the default, right? Because you mentioned you also work a lot on servers.

12:44 And there you're then presented with a completely different shell, perhaps, and set of tools.

12:50 It's a trade-off. And also how much time do you really want to spend customizing this? Because

12:56 yeah, our time is precious.

12:58 Yeah. Yeah. And William out in the audience says for the, for the Windows people,

13:03 Oh My Posh, which, have you done stuff with Oh My Posh? This is also really nice.

13:09 So I guess Posh is for the, oh no, any shell. So not just the PowerShell.

13:14 Yes. This, I think it came out of the PowerShell. So the Posh part, I think it originally was for that,

13:20 but I use this with Z shell and Oh My ZSH together. And it's basically that controls my prompt and Z,

13:28 Oh My Z shell is like all the plugins and, you know, complete your Git branches type of thing.

13:33 But yeah, this, this is really, this is really pretty neat too. Works well for, for Windows people.

13:38 I'd say then indeed the, the, so if your terminal is one thing where you can get a lot of benefit from

13:44 customizing your prompt so that it gives you a little bit more information and context of where

13:51 you are or what your state, in which state your Git repo is in or which virtual environment you're

13:57 working, that can be helpful too, because that is something that you lose easily when you're working

14:03 at the command line is, is context.

14:05 Right. I ran this command and it's not working because actually I forgot to activate the virtual

14:10 environment. So it doesn't have the dependencies or the environmental variables that I set up in that

14:15 virtual environment. Right.

14:16 Exactly.

14:16 Let me give one more shout out for one other thing while people are thinking about making their,

14:21 their stuff better is nerd fonts.

14:24 I'm always eager to learn these things. There is so much out there.

14:28 So nerd fonts, if you're going to get like, Oh, my posh and some of these other extensions that you

14:34 want to make your shell better. So many of them depend on having what are called nerd fonts. Because

14:40 if you look at say on the, Oh, my posh page, there's like these arrows with gaps in them. I mean,

14:46 what font could possibly have like a Git branch symbol and as these like connecting arrows that have

14:53 colors and are woven and all that stuff is nerd fonts. So if you're going to try to run them,

14:58 download and install one of these nerd fonts, and then those will work. Otherwise they're like

15:02 those, I don't understand Unicode square blocks, you know, like when emojis go bad.

15:08 Oh, you still got to install individual fonts. Yeah. So, so it's kind of like you take Consolata or

15:13 something or some other font and it's patched with these additional.

15:17 Some, yeah, something like that. Yeah. So it does, you only need one, but you have to set your terminal

15:23 to one of these to make a choice, set it to one of them and then it'll work. But if you don't,

15:28 then you'll, you'll end up with just like these, these, a lot of these extensions don't work.

15:32 This portion of Talk Python, I mean, is brought to you by Sentry.

15:37 How would you like to remove a little stress from your life? Do you worry that users may be

15:42 encountering errors, slowdowns, or crashes with your app right now? Would you even know it until

15:48 they sent you that support email? How much better would it be to have the error or performance details

15:53 immediately sent to you, including the call stack and values of local variables and the active user

15:58 recorded in the report? With Sentry, this is not only possible, it's simple. In fact, we use Sentry on all

16:05 the Talk Python web properties. We've actually fixed a bug triggered by a user and had the upgrade ready

16:11 to roll out as we got the support email. And that was a great email to write back. Hey, we already saw

16:16 your error and have already rolled out the fix. Imagine their surprise. Surprise and delight your

16:22 users. Create your Sentry account at talkpython.fm/sentry. And if you sign up with the code

16:28 Talk Python, all one word, it's good for two free months of Sentry's business plan, which will give

16:34 you up to 20 times as many monthly events as well as other features. Create better software, delight your

16:40 users and support the podcast. Visit talkpython.fm/sentry and use the coupon code Talk Python.

16:50 Yeah. So when it comes to customizing your shell, then if you still want to talk about that.

16:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's keep going.

16:56 Right. One of the things I think everybody does most often is navigating around. So moving from one

17:04 directory to another. And it can be quite cumbersome to keep on retyping all these long and deeply nested

17:11 directories. So there are a number of solutions that can help with that. I use FASD. Okay.

17:20 So that keeps track of what you've been visiting most often, most recently. So it also, I don't think if,

17:27 I wonder if that one also allows you to set bookmarks. That's what I used to do. I would keep,

17:33 I would have this set of custom shells, shells functions, which actually made it into a plugin,

17:40 about nine years ago into OhMyZSH. So if you, if you have OhMyZSH and the jump plugin is still

17:46 in there. Yeah. That's a, I see. Yep. Yep. So you can just jump around. I see.

17:52 Yeah. You would say, you would say mark, mark this directory under this alias, although it's not really

17:58 an alias, but it's like a bookmark. And then you say, okay, jump to this directory. So that really helps.

18:04 Right. So maybe the source directory for Talk Python, I would just mark it as TP. And I could say on the,

18:09 on the terminal, I could say J space TP. And it would take me this super long, complex directory,

18:15 just bam, you're there, right? Exactly. So I like it. Okay. I might need to try this out. And it comes

18:20 with OhMyZSH? This one? No, this one, it doesn't. It's a separate tool. Okay. I believe.

18:25 Although it might even be a plugin. By now, I don't even know. It's been, it's been a long time since I

18:31 installed it, but FASD. That's what you want to look for. Okay. Very, very cool. I have one that I

18:38 use a lot called McFly. Have you, have you seen McFly? No. So it's similar. And what you do is,

18:44 you know, if you type control R, it'll give you reverse incremental search or whatever that is.

18:49 And I'm, so this overrides that. So if you type control R, it brings up an Emacs, like autocomplete

18:55 type thing that has fuzzy searching. So you could type SSH and then like part of a domain name,

19:01 and it would find you type SSH, you know, root at some that, that, that, that domain name. And it'll,

19:07 it'll give you a list of like all these smart options looking through your history.

19:10 Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And even now, as we talk, I've learned like a dozen new things.

19:15 One thing I have noticed though, is that, you know, you may, the next time you're installing,

19:21 you're setting up your system, you may feel very productive and, and lead like,

19:27 right. When you're installing all these tools, but you still got to make use of them, right?

19:32 Yeah.

19:32 You got to turn that into some kind of a habit. And what I have noticed for me, at least what works

19:38 best is to just take it one tool at a time, make a little cheat sheet for yourself on a piece of paper,

19:45 and just see if that, if you like that tool, if you can, you know, if you get any benefit from it.

19:50 Yeah, absolutely. So related to this actually is, is the concept of aliases, right? In a more generic

19:56 sense, in the pure shell sense that you can define an alias that would then be expanded into some command

20:04 with zero or more arguments. Yeah. So if you have, if you have commands that you would often type like

20:11 a LS for listing your, your files, and you have all these arguments that you don't want to keep on

20:17 typing, then aliases is the way to go. I go crazy with aliases. I absolutely love this. Yeah, I have

20:24 probably 100, 150 aliases in my RC file. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's nice. So at some point,

20:31 I, what you, well, what you may have done is go through, through your history and then see how often

20:36 you use these aliases. Yeah. That's always a fun thing to do. Yeah. For me, it's kind of frustration.

20:42 I'm like, God, I want to do this. Or, you know, I've got to remember, I got to type, oh no, I got

20:46 to go into this directory. And then I got to first type this command, and then I can do this other

20:51 thing. So for example, we talked about the static site generators. So one of the things I have to do

20:56 in order to create new content and see how it looks in the browser is I have to go to a certain directory,

21:01 directory, not where the content is, but a couple up, run Hugo dash D server there, and then it'll

21:08 auto reload. And as I edit the markdown, it'll just refresh. So instead of always remembering how to find

21:14 that directory and then go into the right sort of parent directory and run it, I just now just type

21:18 Hugo right. And that's an alias. And just, it does that. Boom. It just, it just pops open and it's okay.

21:23 It's, it's running. I do my thing. I'm going to, then I got to do a whole bunch of automation in Python

21:28 on top of it and then build it and ship it to the Git and push it for a continuous deployment.

21:33 Now I have just Hugo publish. Boom. And these are all like aliases. The other thing you talked about,

21:38 a single commands is maybe talk about chaining commands and multiple commands.

21:42 Yeah. Because you just mentioned automation in Python. And then I, of course, immediately go like,

21:47 hmm, what's going on there?

21:49 Yeah. So I've got a couple of, I guess they're go commands because they're Hugo. And then I've got

21:56 some Python code that generates a tag cloud and then a Git command that'll publish it. So it's like,

22:00 Hugo, Hugo, Git. No. Hugo, Git. Hugo, Python, Hugo, Git is that all in one alias, right? Which is,

22:09 is beautiful. Oh, nice.

22:10 Yeah. It's beautiful. You know, I don't know if we've exactly, I guess I opened a little bit talking

22:14 about your book, but one of the really core ideas of your book is that the shell can be the integration

22:19 environment across technologies like Go, Python, and Git.

22:24 Exactly. Exactly. The command line doesn't care in what language something has been written. It's like a

22:31 super glue or duct tape, more really, that binds everything together.

22:36 Yeah.

22:37 Yeah. To a certain extent, right? Like duct tape.

22:40 Yeah. Well, it's, it's a, you know, loosely bound, but it's, there's a ton of flexibility in there. And

22:45 if you think, well, I really just want to do these four things, maybe that would be a macro in Excel,

22:50 or some kind of like scripting replay in Windows. But this is, it's on the terminal programs can run

22:58 it. You can run it. It's clearly editable. It's not some weird specific type of macro, right? You're

23:03 like, I want to do these four things. I just type thing and go, I'm sure many people know,

23:07 but if you have multiple commands, you want to run one than the other, you can just say

23:10 ampersand, ampersand between them. And it'll say, run this first thing, then run the other.

23:14 Those are independent. You can also pipe inputs and outputs between them. Right. I see that.

23:19 That's correct.

23:20 You've got some really interesting ways to do that multi-line stuff in your book as well.

23:24 Yeah. Well, yeah. So it depends on what kind of tools you want to combine, right? So you,

23:29 you just mentioned a double ampersand. So that should be used when you only want to run the

23:35 second command when the first one has succeeded, right? If you want to run the second one, regardless

23:41 of what the first one did, you can just use a semi-column. Or if you only want to run the second

23:46 command when the first one failed, there might be a situation where you want to do that. You can use

23:52 double pipe. So for four. Interesting. Okay. And then, yeah. And then you just mentioned piping

23:59 and that's, well, a whole nother story. That's when you want to use the output from the first command

24:07 as input to the second command. And this is where, or data again, comes into play. And this is, so you just

24:15 also mentioned macros, right? Another way to think of them are our functions that you then combine.

24:23 Yeah. Incredibly powerful, but that goes a little bit beyond then of course you should be working with

24:29 commands that produce some text that you want to then further work on. Yeah. You also talk about

24:36 creating bash scripts, which is pretty interesting. I think many people probably know about that or shell

24:40 scripts, .sh files. I guess it could be zshell scripts as well. Yeah. So you gave an interesting

24:46 presentation back at the Strata conference and you had a lot of fun ideas that I think are relevant

24:53 here. So maybe let me just throw out some one-liners and you could maybe riff on that a little bit.

24:57 Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. One of the reasons you said you gave 50 reasons that the shell was awesome.

25:02 And I want to just point out a couple, highlight a couple, let you speak to them. So you said the

25:07 shell is like a REPL that lets you just play with your data. We know the REPL from Python and also

25:13 from Jupyter, but I never really thought of the shell as a REPL, but it kind of is, right?

25:16 Yeah. I think that the shell is the mother of all REPLs. The read, eval, print loop.

25:22 Yep. Right? Having this short feedback loop of doing things and seeing output and then elaborating on

25:29 that I think that is tremendously valuable. And Python users, of course, may recognize this from

25:36 Python itself, right? If you just execute Python, you get a REPL, IPython or Jupyter console. And to a

25:42 certain extent also, Jupyter notebook or JupyterLab is there are some similarities there where you again,

25:49 have this quick feedback loop. And it's a very different experience from writing a script from top to

25:54 bottom or starting at the top and then executing that script from the start every time you want to test

26:01 something. So yeah, it's a different work, different way of working. And I'm not saying one is better than

26:07 the other. But what I do want to say is that there are situations where having such a tight feedback loop can

26:14 be very efficient. Yeah. Especially in the exploration stage, right? Yeah, exactly. Once you go to production,

26:21 right? Once you whatever that means, right? Once you want things to be a bit more stable,

26:26 you don't want to just use duct tape, but you want to use a proper construction. Then, then yeah,

26:34 then, of course, the command line can have different roles there. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kind of the,

26:39 the, the, the rad GUI, the rapid application development GUI, but for data exploration, right? These,

26:45 these REPLs and you know, that's, that's probably why Jupyter is so popular. It just lets you play and see and

26:50 then try. And it just was that, that quick feedback loop is amazing. Another reason said,

26:54 it's awesome. Close to the file system. Yeah. I mean, in the end, it's all files,

26:57 right? Whether you're producing code that lives somewhere, it's in a file, or whether you're working

27:03 with images or log files that get written to something, or you have some configuration, it's all

27:09 files. And we got to do things with these files. We have to move them around. We have to rename them,

27:15 delete them, put them into Git. Yeah. So you want to be close to your file system. You don't want to be

27:22 importing a whole bunch of libraries before you can start doing things with these files.

27:28 Also, when you're doing data science, often it starts with this kind of ingest and understanding

27:34 files, right? CSV or text or others. Yeah. I mean, I sometimes try to immediately do read CSV in Pandas,

27:44 but then, you know, very often I get presented, I get some Unicode error, or it turns out it's the comma

27:52 is not the file, is not the limiter being used. And yeah, you can do that in a sort of trial and error

27:59 way. You can fix that. But it really helps to just being able to look at a file as it is, no parsing,

28:06 just boom, there's my file. And then, yep, once you're comfortable, once you're confident, like,

28:12 okay, this is what my file looks like. This is its structure. Then of course, you can always move on

28:18 to using some other package like Pandas. Okay. Another one that you've said,

28:23 another recommendation you had or sort of way for playing with this was to use Docker. I don't know

28:29 how many people out there who haven't done this for are really familiar, but basically when you start

28:34 up a Docker image, you might say dash it bash or ZSH. And what you get is just you get a basic shell

28:41 inside the Docker container. But in that space, then you can kind of go crazy and do whatever you want

28:46 to the shell and try it out, right? Exactly. Yeah. So there are two scenarios that I can think of. So

28:52 when you're just starting out with the command line, it's a very intimidating environment. And it's quite

28:57 easy to wreck your system if you're not careful. So being inside an isolated environment that

29:04 is sort of shielded off your host operating system can be comforting. So that's one recommendation

29:11 that I would say that why I think you should use Docker. And the other one is reproducibility. Also in

29:17 Python, right, we're dealing with packages that get updated, that get different version numbers,

29:23 where APIs change. And being able to reproduce a certain environment so that you get consistent results

29:33 is also very valuable. Yeah. And I'd like to sort of highlight the converse as well. You said playing

29:40 with Docker containers is a cool way to experiment with the shell. If you care about Docker containers,

29:45 you need to know the shell to do things to it. Because you might think, oh, I'm just going to make a Docker

29:49 file. I don't need to know the shell. Like what goes in the Docker file, a whole bunch of commands that

29:54 many of them look like exactly what you would run on the shell. You just put it in a certain location

30:00 or as a command argument to some configuration thing in there. And so you really, if you're going to do

30:05 things with containers, the way you speak to them is mostly through shell-like commands.

30:10 This portion of Talk Python to me is brought to you by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.

30:18 Starting a business is hard. By some estimates, over 90% of startups will go out of business in just their first

30:24 year. With that in mind, Microsoft for Startups set out to understand what startups need to be successful and to

30:31 create a digital platform to help them overcome those challenges. Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub was born.

30:37 Founders Hub provides all founders at any stage with free resources to solve their startup challenges.

30:44 The platform provides technology benefits, access to expert guidance and skilled resources, mentorship and networking

30:50 connections, and much more. Unlike others in the industry, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub doesn't require startups to be

30:58 investor-backed or third-party validated to participate. Founders Hub is truly open to all.

31:04 So what do you get if you join them? You speed up your development with free access to GitHub and Microsoft

31:10 cloud computing resources and the ability to unlock more credits over time. To help your startup innovate,

31:16 Founders Hub is partnering with innovative companies like OpenAI, a global leader in AI research and development,

31:22 to provide exclusive benefits and discounts. Through Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub,

31:27 Founders Hub is no longer about who you know. You'll have access to their mentorship network,

31:31 giving you a pool of hundreds of mentors across a range of disciplines and areas like idea validation,

31:38 fundraising, management and coaching, sales and marketing, as well as specific technical stress points.

31:43 You'll be able to book a one-on-one meeting with the mentors, many of whom are former founders themselves.

31:48 So one of the cool tools that you had in that presentation was you talked about explainshell.com.

32:12 Yeah. What is this?

32:13 Well, you can try out. So what you see here on the screen is explainshell.com and it will break down

32:21 a long command and start explaining. So it will, it will, what I think the authors have done is they have

32:30 used all these manual pages and extracted bits and pieces that they then present to you in a, in an order

32:37 that corresponds to the command that you're pasting into this. So if you see, you know, on Stack Overflow,

32:42 you see this, this incantation and you're like, all right, what does it mean? And you don't want to go through the manual page yourself.

32:50 Right. Okay. So what's, what does dash F mean? What is this X, Z, V, F for the tar command mean?

32:58 Then explainshell can do this trick for you.

33:00 Yeah. It's amazing. When I first thought, I thought, okay, well this, what this is going to be is this

33:04 is going to be like the man page. So if you type LS, it'll show you a simple list directory contents and

33:10 you click on it, it'll give you additional arguments you can pass. But you could then say, like you said,

33:16 you could say dash L and it'll say the LS means list contents. The L means use the long listing format.

33:22 And you're like, oh, okay, hold on. What if I said, get, get checkout main. And you'll say, okay,

33:28 well get checkout does this. And then main it'll actually parse it apart. And there's some really

33:33 wild examples on here that like right on the page that are highlighted on the homepage of that site.

33:39 You click it and boom, it gives you this cool graph of like, what the heck? It even shows like

33:44 the ampersand at the double ampersand and the double or combining, as you mentioned before.

33:49 Yeah, it is. It is. It's really useful, especially when you're just, you know,

33:55 getting started with the command line and you're overwhelmed, like we all are in the beginning,

33:59 and sometimes still are then, you know, adding adding some context like this really helps.

34:04 I once wrote a utility that allowed you to use explain shell.com from the command line. So you would

34:10 just, you wouldn't leave the command line. I don't think it works any longer. But yeah, that was a fun

34:16 exercise. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very neat. One of the things that I learned was parallel.

34:23 Oh, yeah. So tell us about parallel. Like this is a command you can run on the terminal. And it

34:30 sounds like it does stuff in parallel. That sounds amazing.

34:32 Yeah. Yeah. Like the name implies parallel is a tool. And we're talking about GNU parallel here.

34:37 There's another version out there that is similar, but different. GNU parallel, this tool that doesn't

34:44 doesn't do anything by itself, but it multiplies. It's a force multiplier for all the other tools.

34:50 So what this tool is able to do is will parallelize your pipeline. It will be able to run jobs on

35:00 multiple cores and even distribute them to other machines if you have those available. Right. So,

35:07 Michael, you mentioned you're working on a server. Well, if you can SSH into other servers as well,

35:15 you can leverage those. That's something that GNU parallel can do. The way it works is that you feed

35:20 it a list of something. Could be a list of file names. Could be a list of URLs. Could be your log files.

35:27 If you can then think of the problem that you want to solve. If you can break it down into smaller chunks,

35:34 then GNU parallel might be able to help you out there. So these jobs should be working independently

35:41 from each other. Yeah. There can be, yeah, it's nearly impossible to have those two jobs communicate

35:47 with each other. But let's say you have for your blog, right? In Hugo, you have a whole bunch of

35:53 ping files that you want to convert to to JPEGs. WebP or something. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean,

35:58 it's a bad example because this particular tool that I would then use already supports doing multiple

36:04 files. But let's just assume that this tool can only handle one file at a time. Yeah. Then you would

36:11 specify your command and then at certain places where necessary use placeholders. Yeah. So,

36:17 okay, this is where the file name goes and this is the file where the file name goes with a new

36:21 extension. So it's one of my favorite tools really. Yeah. That's fantastic. So for example, if you had

36:27 a bunch of web pages and you wanted to compute the sentiment analysis, right, as a data scientist,

36:32 you want to download it, compute the sentiment analysis, and then save that to a CSV or pin it to a CSV.

36:38 Yeah. You know, maybe somebody gave you that script and it's only written to talk to one thing and you

36:43 don't want to rewrite it or touch it or get involved with it, right? This is your way to unlock the

36:48 parallel of something, right? Yeah. In fact, let's talk a little bit more about this because I think

36:52 this is an important point in that I'm sure that we've all come across when we're working in Python

36:57 and you're thinking like, okay, I can speed this up. I want to do things in parallel. You know what?

37:03 I'm going to do multi-threading or what is it that you use these days in Python?

37:08 Yeah. Async and await maybe if it's I/O or something like that. Yeah.

37:11 You've got your pool of workers or I don't know. Basically, you're programming it yourself from the

37:16 ground up. Right. Multi-processing potentially.

37:18 Probably the closest. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

37:21 The trick then is to realize that there is already a tool out there that can do that for you. All that you

37:27 need to do is make sure that your Python code becomes a command line tool. Yeah.

37:33 And we can talk a little bit more about that, but there are just five, six steps needed to make that

37:38 happen. Once you realize that, then you can start turning existing Python code into command line tools

37:44 and start combining it with all the other tools that are already available, including parallel.

37:49 Yeah. It's awesome. I think it's a really cool idea because maybe the person working with the code

37:55 doesn't understand multi-processing and thread synchronization and all these tricky concepts.

38:01 Like, just give me a thing that does it once with command line arguments and I got it.

38:05 it. You know, like you, or you've, you picked it up from somewhere out in the audience. The question

38:10 is, is there a GIL associated with this? And I mean, technically yes, but it's not interfering with the

38:16 computation because it's multiple processes. It's not threads within a process. Right. So it should be

38:21 able to just run. Yeah. There will be one GIL per Python process. Right. Yeah. That's right. And so it

38:28 doesn't matter because if you say there's five jobs, you have five processes, right? There's no contention there.

38:33 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Oh, so yeah. Let's talk a little bit about this idea of turning Python

38:40 scripts into command line tools. Yeah. I think that that's really valuable for people. It is. And

38:45 we can then put it in the show notes. I might have already given a talk about this. I'm actually not

38:51 sure if it's publicly available. Anyway, there are only a couple of steps and it's not that difficult.

38:58 So first of all, let's assume that you have some Python code out there. Yeah. You have it in a

39:03 file and let's just for simplicity's sake, assume it's a single file. Right. So what would you then

39:10 need to do to turn this into a command line tool, something that can be run on the command line. So

39:16 the way that you can currently run this is by saying, okay, Python, and then the name of the file,

39:21 right? That doesn't really sound like it's a command line tool. So the very first thing here then is to

39:28 add one line at the very top that would then start with a hash and an exclamation mark or a

39:35 hash bang or a shebang as it's called. These are two special characters and they instruct the shell.

39:43 This can be executed. What is the binary that's going to do the executing? Right. Yeah.

39:47 Executing. Right. Yeah. Exactly. That's what then would come after that. So you would have hash bang,

39:53 and then it would point to the Python executable. Yeah. Right. There's some details there.

39:58 It could be a certain version. It could be out of a virtual environment, potentially. And I think it

40:02 could go wherever, right? You don't want to overcomplicate it probably, but like you could point

40:06 to, you could point to different versions of Python. You could point, because you, you give it a full path to

40:11 executable. Exactly. Exactly. There's some, there's some compatibility issues there, but essentially is

40:17 you tell your shell, okay, which program should interpret my code. And that is some Python out

40:23 there that you have installed. So that's the first step. Then after you've done this, you no longer

40:29 need to type Python anymore because the file itself contains which executable should be, should be run.

40:36 But then you'll notice that you don't have the necessary permissions. What you need to do is you

40:40 need to enable the execution bit. This would give you as the user permission to actually execute this file.

40:48 You do that, of course, with a command line tool. It's called SHMOD, C-H-M-O-D for change mode. And then

40:56 U plus X, the name of the file, right? These details are, if you're really interested, one place where you can

41:01 find them is in chapter four of my book, data science at the command line, which you can read for free.

41:06 Okay. But let's say that you've enabled these, the execution bit. Now you can,

41:11 now you can run it. You would still need to type period and a slash because this file is presumably

41:20 not yet on your search path. So your search path is a, is a list of directories where your shell will be

41:27 looking for the executable that you want to run. Where is your tool located? Well, it should be

41:32 somewhere on the search path. So either you add another path to the search path or you move the tool

41:39 to one of the existing directories out there. That's about it for making your code executable. But then you

41:46 want to change one or two things about the code itself. Yeah. So one thing to do is look for any

41:53 hard coded values that you actually want to be, want to make dynamic, right? These should be turned

42:01 into command line arguments. And actually you can take that one step further. If one portion of your file

42:07 is doing something that can be done by another command line tool, then consider removing that. For example,

42:14 downloading a file. Yeah. There is of course a tool for that on the command line. Why would you then

42:20 write this yourself? Of course, there's a time and a place for that, but let's say, okay, a very

42:25 contrived example is a Python program that would count words. Yeah. Right. Right. If your code has some

42:33 hard coded website. Yeah. I mean, why you would make your tool more generic by getting rid of that hard

42:39 code URL and we'll turn it into a command line argument. Okay. Which website would you like to

42:44 download or to go one step further is to think, okay, you know what? I don't really care where the

42:50 text is coming from. I just want to count words. Give me text somehow. Yeah. Sorry. Just give me the

42:56 text. Don't tell me the URL. Yeah. So your tool should then be reading from standard input, which is a special

43:03 channel from which you can receive data. And this is also where the piping would come in. Yeah. So you

43:09 would first use a tool that would get this text, right? Maybe it's some log file. So you want to count

43:15 your errors or it's another website and you want to do stuff to that. It doesn't really matter, but you

43:22 would then that would write to its standard output. Yeah. And you would combine the standard output from

43:28 the first tool with your standard input using the pipe operator. So that's then basically it for,

43:34 I mean, of course, if you want to take this further, you can think about, you know, adding some help,

43:40 some nice looking help. Yeah. Think about the arguments themselves. Do you want to use short options or long

43:46 options? Exactly. Right. So something like Typer or Click or one of these formal CLI frameworks. Yeah.

43:53 Probably really. Python, of course, has ArgParse, but there are packages out there that can really help

44:00 you build beautiful command line tools. Typer is one of them. I'm currently using Click. Also,

44:07 Click combination with Rich. Mm-hmm . So of course, the author of Rich was on the show a couple of episodes ago.

44:15 Yeah. Will McGoogan. Very good stuff. Yeah. Why we're talking about that? You know,

44:20 the other thing that's really pretty interesting is the Rich CLI. Have you played with Rich CLI?

44:25 Which, oh, oh yeah. Okay. So that's indeed a command line tool in itself that can do a whole bunch of

44:31 things. Yeah. You want to tell us something about that? No, I haven't done much with it,

44:34 but you can do things like if you install the Rich CLI, then you can say things, there's lots of ways to

44:41 install it. You could say like Rich and then a Python file or a JavaScript file or a JSON file,

44:46 and it'll give you pretty printed color, you know, syntax highlighted printout. You can say,

44:51 Rich, some CSV file, and it'll give you a formatted table inside your terminal with colors and everything

44:57 of it understands markdown and like renders markdown. And there's all sorts. So if you're kind of

45:03 exploring files and you're happy with Python things and like installing the Rich CLI is a pretty neat way

45:09 to go as well. Yeah. It's a nifty tool, but just not to get confused. So this tool is provided by Rich

45:16 and it uses Rich to produce, you know, nice looking output. But just imagine that you can write your own

45:22 command line tools that would also produce this nice looking output. And for that, you can then use

45:28 this package called Rich. Right. In combination, perhaps with things like Typer or Click. And

45:34 DocOpt is another way you can go. There are so many tools out there. Yeah, there absolutely are. One other

45:42 thing I would like to point out that, so just taking the script and making it executable and put it in the

45:47 path, that's kind of a great way to take scripts that you have and make them CLI commands for you.

45:54 If you want to like formalize this a little bit more, I recently ran across this project called

45:59 the Twitter Archive Parser. And I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of turmoil at Twitter.

46:04 And so what you can do is you go to Twitter and download your entire history of like thousands of

46:10 tweets or whatever as HTML file and some JSON files, and you can save them for yourself.

46:16 But the content of like all of the links are the shortened to.co Twitter short links. And if

46:25 Twitter were to go away, you'd have no idea what any of your links you've ever mentioned ever were.

46:29 And also the images that you get are the low res images, and you can get the high res images if you

46:34 know how to download them. So this guy, Tim Hutton created this really cool utility that you can

46:39 down, you can take that downloaded archive and upgrade it to standalone with high res images and full

46:45 full resolved links, not shortened links. Pretty cool, right? But if you look at the way to like,

46:50 how do you use it? Okay, where does it say this? Not sure where it is. Yeah. So how do I use it? I

46:55 download my Twitter archive and unzip it fine. And then I download the Python file to the working

47:01 directory. And then I go in there and I type Python that file. Wouldn't it be better if I could just,

47:08 you know, it has dependencies that has to install in order for it to run? Wouldn't it be better if I

47:12 could just use this as a command? So what I did is I forked this. And I said, I'm going to add a

47:17 pyproject.toml to turn this into a package. And then under the pyproject.toml, you say project.scripts,

47:25 Twitter archive markdown, Twitter archive images, and you, you map into your package and then functions

47:30 that you want to call. And then once you pip install this, these commands become just CLI commands.

47:36 And it doesn't matter how that happened long as your Python packages are in the path, which they

47:41 generally have to be anyway, because you want to do things like pytest and black, then if you just

47:45 pip install this project, it adopts all these commands here, which is pretty cool. Nice. Is it

47:50 then necessary to add this bin directory once to your search path? Because it lives, it would live

47:58 somewhere on their site packages, right? Yes, exactly. And so if you have a Python installation and you try

48:04 to pip install something, you'll get a warning that the site packages are not in the path. So you do have

48:08 to do that. And then go one further, you could do pip x. I don't know if you played with pip x. pip x is

48:15 awesome. So it'll generate the package environments and install the dependencies in an isolated

48:20 environment. And it'll set up the path if you just say ensure path. Then so if you pip x install the

48:24 thing with the commands in it, those automatically get managed and upgraded by pip x as just part of

48:31 your CLI, which like that's a perfect chain of like a four, but you've got to have a formal package

48:36 and like a place to install it from like get or pipe I or whatever. But it's still, it's still a,

48:41 like a neat pro level type of thing. I think. Yeah. Yeah. You can take this pretty far,

48:45 make it really professional. And before you know it, you start maintaining it for.

48:50 Yeah, exactly. Why am I doing PRs on this silly thing? I don't know.

48:54 Yeah. But just to clarify, if you say for a one off or a two off, you want to make something that is

49:01 reproducible, right? So a reusable command line tool, not reproducible, reusable. You don't really need

49:07 any other packages. You can use a sys.argv, right? You import sys and then you have your sys.argv.

49:15 And I do that. I do that a fair amount of times. Yeah. It's only for me, I've created an alias. So

49:21 it always gets the right argument. There's like, there's no ambiguity. Sys.argv bracket one, let's go.

49:26 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked a lot about sort of around all the cool things we can do with

49:31 the command line. But in your book, you actually talked about a bunch of surprising tools. So like,

49:37 one of the things you talked about is obtaining data and you hinted at this before, like you can

49:41 just use curl for downloading those kinds of things. But if you get a little bit farther,

49:46 like under scrubbing data, you talk about grec, rep, and awk that a lot of people maybe know.

49:52 But then if we go a tad further over to say exploring data, then all of a sudden you can

49:57 type things like head of some CSV file and it kind of does the same thing as Jupyter. Or there's things

50:05 like CSV cut and SQL, CSV, CSV, SQL. Talk about some of these maybe more direct data science tools that

50:13 people can use. Right. So let's see then where to begin. You mentioned a couple of tools, right?

50:20 The head and awk and grep. Those are, you know, I would consider them the classic command line tools,

50:28 right? I would too. Part of core utils, GNU core utils, right? You can, if you have a fresh install,

50:35 then you can expect those tools to be present. Yeah. If you're not on Windows. So those tools,

50:42 they operate on text, on plain text, and they have no notion of any other structure that might be

50:49 present in this data. Say CSV for when you have some rectangular structure or JSON, when you can have

50:57 a potentially deeply nested data structure. These tools know nothing about that. That doesn't make

51:02 them entirely useless, right? There are ways to work around them, around that issue. But there are nowadays

51:10 plenty of tools available that are able to work with this structure. Right. And one of them is actually a

51:18 suite of tools. It's called CSV kit. And you can install it as a Python package. Okay. Through pip,

51:25 which of course we do at the command line. CSV kit, you say? Yeah, exactly. And then you get a whole bunch of

51:33 tools that understand that lines are rows. The first line is a header and all these fields are delimited

51:42 by default by a comma. And then you can do things like extract columns or sort a file according to a

51:50 certain column. Yeah. So this is more difficult for when you're working with core data utils. And of course,

51:57 all of these things you can do in Pandas, and it might even be faster in Pandas as opposed to these

52:05 CSV tools, not as opposed to the classic command line tools. But I mean, in order to get started with

52:14 Pandas, right, just imagine that you're given this file by your colleague and you're asked to quickly

52:21 to sum things together, right? And in order to just get started with Pandas, what are then the things

52:26 that you need to do? Yeah, fire up JupyterLab, import Pandas, and maybe a bunch of other things. There is,

52:33 of course, also a time and a place for that. Definitely, definitely. I always use the tool that gets

52:39 the job done. Don't get me wrong here. But it's just so incredibly powerful to just, if it solves the job,

52:45 just whip up a command on the command line using a couple of tools there. If you're going that route,

52:53 then CSV kit is not the only suite of tools that you should know about. XSV written in Rust, but yeah,

53:01 you shouldn't care about that because the command line doesn't care. It's generally faster. One thing

53:06 that CSV kit can do, by the way, and I'm actually kind of proud that I have been able to contribute

53:12 that tool to the suite of tools is CSV SQL. And it allows you to run a SQL query directly on the CSV file.

53:22 Yeah. So if you are familiar with the SQL, then you can leverage that knowledge directly at the command

53:30 line without first having to create a new database and import that CSV file in there and so forth.

53:35 All right. So one of the things you can do on the command line is basically just give it,

53:39 like, here's a SQLite file database, and now go insert all the things from the CSV file into it.

53:47 Here in this example, it has this create table statement. Does it figure that out from the CSV,

53:52 or do you need to write that? It figures it out. Yeah. It does some, it looks at the first, say, a thousand rows and then figure out like, okay, this is a number. This is text.

54:02 I see. Yeah. Oh, cool.

54:04 But I was actually talking about the other tool and that's SQL to CSV. I always mix those up.

54:11 The reverse. Yeah.

54:11 Yeah. Yes, exactly. This one. And there it still uses SQLite under the hood,

54:17 but you don't need to worry about that. It takes care of the, of all that boilerplate for you.

54:21 You just say, okay, you know, select these columns from standard input, order them by this column. This

54:28 is the file or I've piped. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, maybe you've got

54:34 like some production database and you want to filter out. I just need this table with this particular

54:40 query, right? It's like, I only want to focus on my region of this data, give it to me as a CSV file,

54:46 and then you can go work on it all you want. You don't have to be connected to the database or near it

54:52 or any of those things, right? Potentially, if it doesn't have any sensitive data, you could share that,

54:56 right? You would never share the connection string to your database. That'd be insane.

55:00 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Very cool. So what are some of the other tools? Well, if we go back,

55:06 if I go back to the CSV kit, you can see there's some of these you talked about. There's into CSV.

55:14 That one takes an Excel, XSL or XSLX and converts it to a CSV just on the command prompt or the terminal,

55:21 right? Yep. Yeah. Okay. Also, I should point out that I'm not the, the author of CSV kit,

55:27 right? I just contributed a small portion to it because of the ingredients that were already there.

55:33 Still proud of it though, but it's being created by many other people.

55:39 Sure. Of course. Some other things it has is like, CSV stat and CSV rep. Yeah. A lot of,

55:46 a lot of cool command line options to point at these things, right? Let's see. I pulled out, some others.

55:53 Rush. So one of the areas that they, the graph, the basically plotting to do, we're basically out of

55:59 time, but I want to, I want to talk about two things really quick. Right. The, some of this,

56:03 which chapter did you put it under where you have the pictures? Oops. seven. So seven,

56:09 visualizing, exploring data and then yeah. So if you, so tell us a little bit about this,

56:15 like you can plot stuff in your terminal. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. I should say that rush

56:21 is a proof of concept, right? It's one of those projects that have a lot of potential, but don't

56:28 necessarily have enough users. And I don't necessarily have enough time to maintain it properly, but it does

56:35 prove the concept rush the name. I mean, it's for when you're in a rush, it's R on the shell and,

56:43 what it does, it, it leverages R under the hood and, for plotting, it leverages a particular R package,

56:51 GG plot two, which is the data visualization package for when you're working with R. Yeah.

56:57 Kind of the, the sibling or where Matt plot lib is a little bit derived from that, I believe. Right.

57:03 Well, well, well, now you're mentioning that actually map, it is very different. It's a map

57:10 out. It is very low level and gives you a lot of flexibility, but also requires a lot of work.

57:15 Now, if you're, if you want to visualize data in Python in a similar way that GG plot uses,

57:22 then I can recommend plot mine. So that's a Python package that is, modeled after GG plot to API,

57:31 but, that was a little bit, a little segue there. Now somebody else created a backend for

57:40 GG plot that allows you to create visualizations on the command line. What I then did was create this

57:47 interface. So something that would translate arguments and their values to the appropriate

57:54 function call. And also does a lot of border plate when it comes to reading in the CSV file that you

57:59 provide, right? If you were to do this in R itself, it would require, let's say about five lines of code

58:08 in order to get started. Right. And then the same also for Python, right? So similar concept, right?

58:14 import the appropriate packages or modules, reading in some file and there's all this setup. And you know,

58:21 again, that is probably what you want when you want things to be a little bit more robust, but when you

58:26 want to get stuff done quickly, yeah, it really helps to be able to do that as a one liner on a command line.

58:32 So I make use of all this, yeah, elaborate machinery, you know, in R just to, use that at the command line.

58:44 So a beautiful little wrapper around this complex thing, but it hides the complex complexity, right?

58:50 Exactly. Exactly.

58:51 Yeah. So you can do beautiful, like bar plots. There's a lot of neat stuff in here. I really like this.

58:57 It is really nice. And, now that I see this again, I get excited again. There is

59:04 definitely potential there, but you know, it's, it's again, yet another open source project that has to be,

59:10 maintained. And unfortunately my time is limited like, like everybody else's.

59:17 Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. All right. The last, last thing we have time for is this

59:21 polyglot data science. Tell us a little bit about this. Yeah. So polyglot data science is the idea

59:27 that in order to get things done, you might need to use multiple tools, multiple languages really. And,

59:36 throughout the book up until then, up until that chapter, we have mainly been focusing on using other

59:44 languages from the command line, but this chapter considers the other way around, right? Using the

59:50 command line from another language. So there might've been a situation where you're working in Python and

59:57 then all of a sudden like, ah, now I got to do this, this regular expression, or I got to do some globing

01:00:03 and, or I got to call, I have to call this, this other tool that is not written in Python, but can be

01:00:10 called from the command line, right? You would maybe use sub process, sub process module for that. These are

01:00:16 situations where you want to leverage the command line, where you want to break out of Python and do parts of

01:00:23 your computation on the command line. And in that chapter, chapter 10, I demonstrate this not only for

01:00:31 Python itself, but also in other languages and tools, including Jupyter lab, where you can pass around,

01:00:38 say a variable as standard input or, and also retrieve the output then so that you can continue working in

01:00:46 Python again with the output. So, and, what is still very interesting to me is that even new

01:00:54 languages and tools somehow still offer a way to leverage the command line. So Spark, Apache Spark,

01:01:03 has a pipe method where you can pass an entire dataset, right? RDD through a command line tool. And that,

01:01:12 I think that is just, it is, maybe it was just a fun little hack what the authors did. I don't know.

01:01:18 I tried to, to view it as a, as a compliment, like, okay, some, sometimes we just need to go back to the

01:01:25 basics and, and use the command line because once you're there, you're back in this environment where

01:01:31 you can use everything else. So everything we've spoken about so far is now accessible as a command,

01:01:36 be it go or Python or your own script or whatever. Exactly. So let's say,

01:01:41 you've written this, you've come across this really nice tool, but it's written in Ruby. Oh no. What

01:01:48 you're gonna, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna all of a sudden become, you know, involved into Ruby?

01:01:54 No. Assuming that this tool can be used from the command line, you can of course, relax, just use the

01:01:59 sub process module and still you incorporate that Ruby tool into your own script. That's the idea.

01:02:06 Yeah. I do want to maybe point out just really quickly here, like this has got a little bit of a,

01:02:12 a little Bobby tables warning asterisk by it, you know?

01:02:15 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So for example, one of the things that's awesome here is I could run

01:02:20 Jupyter console as you show. And then if you say exclamation mark command that pumps it straight to

01:02:25 the shell. So you could say bang date, and it would tell you the day you go a bang pip install --upgrade

01:02:31 request and that'll go and execute that command. Don't do that with user input. Right? Who knows

01:02:37 what they're going to do. You can also do that within Jupyter notebooks you point out, right? So you can do,

01:02:43 what is it? Percent percent bash and then some interesting complicated thing there, right?

01:02:49 That's pretty. Yeah. Yeah. That's indeed the, the magic command that you can use in, in Jupyter notebook.

01:02:55 Right. And then higher cell is bash. Yeah. And so then you take what's left of that and then you head

01:03:00 over to explain shell and figure out what the heck it means. Yeah. Maybe do that before you run it. Yeah.

01:03:07 Yeah. That's a good idea. And then also in, in Python using sub process is something that I've done

01:03:14 several times. I need to automate generating some big import of say 150 video files across a bunch of

01:03:22 directories to build a course that we're going to offer. Well, and to the database I have to put,

01:03:26 how long is each one of those? I have no idea how to get the duration out of an MP4 or MOV file.

01:03:33 You know what? There's a really cool command line program I can run. It'll tell me. So I just use

01:03:38 sub process and call that. And then I can script out the rest in Python and it's, you know,

01:03:42 sub process is not to be underestimated. I think. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, it makes a lot of sense. I mean,

01:03:48 at a certain point, shell scripts can get a little bit too hairy to work with being able to automate

01:03:54 your things and use Python as your super glue, right? So a little bit stronger than duct tape,

01:04:01 I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah. We talked to the beginning about how

01:04:04 you're in this exploration stage and you just want to just run a bunch of stuff on the command line and

01:04:08 figure it out. But when you go to production and you said, whatever that means, like this could be one

01:04:12 of one thing that it means we're going to write formal Python code and then use sub process to

01:04:17 kind of bring in some of this functionality potentially. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the command

01:04:22 line is by definition, very ad hoc in nature. Still, if you're doing things in production, meaning you're

01:04:29 interacting with, with other environments, with, with the servers, or you have some kind of continuous

01:04:34 integration going on, there are these places, these are places where the command line keeps popping up.

01:04:41 Yeah. Right. So even there, so it is useful to at least be comfortable with this stark and unforgiving

01:04:49 environment. I think it's really excellent. I think there's a lot of cool stuff that we talked about. I

01:04:54 think there's a lot of, a lot of value for people to learn this. I guess, you know, maybe we close this

01:04:59 out with just one comment that I remember from your Strata presentation. You said the command line is

01:05:05 like wine. Maybe it takes a while to appreciate, but it gets better with age. I certainly, my first

01:05:12 experience was like, okay, I'm going to go from windows and Mac dev development over to setting up and

01:05:17 running servers over SSH. It was like, I am beyond lost. I have no idea even like just how to get started,

01:05:24 right? Many years ago. And, and now it's like, well, of course that's a beautiful way. And it just,

01:05:28 just you slowly build up these, these skills and it's, it's really lovely.

01:05:32 Yeah, it is. No, it took me a long time to get comfortable with the command line actually,

01:05:36 or Linux in a more generic sense. I, for the longest time I was running windows and Linux in a,

01:05:43 in a dual boot machine. And so I just couldn't make the jump. And this was, over 10 years ago,

01:05:50 but, no, it didn't definitely didn't come overnight and I wasn't born with it. So I also believe that

01:05:56 everybody is able to, to embrace the command line, if you will, but you just gotta, you know,

01:06:02 make yourself a little bit comfortable there as well. We talked about that in the beginning,

01:06:05 right? The right terminal, the right aliases can get you a long way.

01:06:09 They get you so far and tools like Oh, my Z shell and some of these others, the fast that will help

01:06:16 you remember the thing you needed to type or, or like you said, aliases and kind of bring it all

01:06:21 together. And like, ah, I know I did that thing. Let me just do a quick search for, yeah, there it is.

01:06:25 Five, you know, five weeks ago I ran this and that's how I, this is how I restart the web server. Oh yeah.

01:06:29 Now I remember. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can talk about this all night. I think we're probably out of time

01:06:35 though. Let me ask you the final two questions before you get out of here. You're going to do some

01:06:40 editing or write some code. What editor do you choose these days? I am torn between Visual Studio Code,

01:06:47 doom Emacs and Neo Vim. And I, but wherever I am in these editors, I always have my Vim key bindings

01:06:55 set up. So it kind of depends on the project, but yeah, as long as I have my Vim key bindings, I'm happy.

01:07:01 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then notable, normally I ask notable PI project or library, but maybe broaden

01:07:11 a little bit. Like if you could recommend one tool, one library people could install for the command prompt

01:07:17 or the shell, what would you say? One tool or one command line tool for that they could install on the shell.

01:07:24 Just something, it doesn't have to be the most popular. Something like people, if I ran across this,

01:07:28 it was delightful. People should know about X. Yeah. Can do parallel. Let's do it. Let's say,

01:07:33 yeah, we talked about it. So it doesn't require any further explanation. It's the tool that, that,

01:07:39 you know, makes every other tool way cooler. Yeah. So yeah, if you have that one in your arsenal,

01:07:45 you can become very powerful. That's a good recommendation. All right. Well, final call to action.

01:07:50 People are excited about this. They want to learn more about it. What do you tell them?

01:07:53 Yeah. A couple of things they can do. So my book, Data Science at the Command Line is freely available.

01:07:58 Yeah. So the second edition came out a year ago. You can read it for free on data science at command

01:08:04 line.com. I also offer a cohort based course that I do twice a year. The next cohort is coming up in April.

01:08:15 And this is, yeah, there, we, we have six live sessions and then I will, I help, you know,

01:08:22 a group of researchers and developers, you know, embracing the command line. It's a, a, a, a very

01:08:28 different experience than reading a book. If you want to know more about that, then also data science at

01:08:34 the command line.com has a link to that. Apart from that. Yeah. I mean, if you just follow

01:08:39 hacker news, you'll come across now that you're aware of the, of all these tools, you'll come across

01:08:45 quite a lot of tools every now and then there's not a week in which there's not a tool being mentioned.

01:08:51 There are tools being developed every day, even though it's a, you know, the technology is over

01:08:55 50 years old. It's impossible to keep up. It's only getting cooler. It is only getting cooler.

01:09:01 Yeah, definitely. So yeah, that's my, my recommendation there. All right. Fantastic. Well,

01:09:06 thanks for being here. It's been great. Congrats on the book and putting all this together. Yeah.

01:09:10 Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. You bet. Bye. Bye.

01:09:12 Bye.

01:09:12 Bye.

01:09:12 Bye.

01:09:13 Bye.

01:09:14 This has been another episode of Talk Python to me. Thank you to our sponsors. Be sure to check

01:09:19 out what they're offering. It really helps support the show. Take some stress out of your life. Get

01:09:24 notified immediately about errors and performance issues in your web or mobile applications with

01:09:29 Sentry. Just visit talkpython.fm/sentry and get started for free. And be sure to use the promo code

01:09:36 talkpython, all one word. Starting a business is hard. Microsoft for startups, founders,

01:09:42 hub provides all founders at any stage with free resources and connections to solve startup

01:09:48 challenges. Apply for free today at talkpython.fm/foundershub. Want to level up your Python? We have one of the

01:09:56 largest catalogs of Python video courses over at Talk Python. Our content ranges from true beginners

01:10:01 to deeply advanced topics like memory and async. And best of all, there's not a subscription in sight.

01:10:07 Check it out for yourself at training.talkpython.fm. Be sure to subscribe to the

01:10:11 show. Open your favorite podcast app and search for Python. We should be right at the top. You can

01:10:16 also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the direct RSS feed at /rss on

01:10:24 talkpython.fm. We're live streaming most of our recordings these days. If you want to be part of

01:10:29 the show and have your comments featured on the air, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at

01:10:34 talkpython.fm/youtube. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Thanks so much for listening. I really

01:10:40 appreciate it. Now get out there and write some Python code.

01:10:45 I'm out.