Hello, checkiomates🐱‍👤!

This week's digest offers a philosophical look at programming, featuring an interview with Guido van Rossum on Python's simplicity and future beyond the AI hype. We also explore the importance of real-world problem-solving over complex data structures, and discuss how to integrate AI tools effectively without compromising core skills. Our mission challenges you to create a "smart" assistant for giving perfect plant watering advice.

💡TIP

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🏁 MISSION

The Digital Botanist by freeman_lex -

Your mission is to create a "smart" assistant that can give perfect watering advice for different types of plants. Based on a set of rules, the function must return a string with the correct advice: "Do not water", "Water the plant", "Unknown plant type" or "Check the soil again tomorrow".

get_watering_advice("Succulent", 11, True) == "Do not water"
get_watering_advice("Tropical", 3, False) == "Check the soil again tomorrow"
get_watering_advice("Default", 8, False) == "Water the plant"
get_watering_advice("Plant", 8, False) == "Unknown plant type"

📖 ARTICLES

Guido van Rossum on Python’s Philosophy, Simplicity, and the Future of Programming -

Interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum and they talk about how AI is effecting the industry. Guido isn’t worried about world killing robots, but it becoming easier for bad actors to do bad things.

Evolving Teaching Python in the Classroom -

How is teaching young students Python changing with the advent of LLMs? Kelly Schuster-Paredes from the Teaching Python podcast joins to discuss coding and AI in the classroom.

How to Use AI Without Becoming Stupid -

This essay will introduce a rule for AI use that should prevent a whole host of bad outcomes. More importantly, the rule is built on top of some smart philosophy, which means it is carefully selected to be invariant — that is, it shouldn’t change until we get to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

👩‍💻CODE SHOT

What do you think the following code does?

def checkio(line: str) -> str:
    stack = []
    for s in line:
        if stack and stack[~0] == s:
            stack.pop()
        else:
            stack.append(s)
    return ''.join(stack)

🙌 Thanks for your attention! Hope to meet you at CheckiO, as well as at our Instagram and Twitter! We are really interested in your thoughts! Please, leave a comment below! ⤵