Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

At a job interview on Friday, I had to write code, and one of the things that came up when we were talking about implementation of a concept was recursion. The director of the group said to me "Don't ...

I have seen recursion code implode on itself on the JVM before. In this case, we caught the annoying stack overflow problem before it went into production and I had to work a good number of hours in ...