About
I'm a Math/Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
In my free time, I write code for open-source and my own projects. Away from the keyboard, I enjoy reading, sailing, running, geocaching, travel, and learning French.
You can find me on LinkedIn, twitter, and Facebook. You can also contact me the old-fashioned way at blog@paulbutler.org. Here is my résumé.
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Category Archives: Python
Why R doesn't suck
I first encountered the R programming language a few years ago when I needed to make some plots. Although I’ve used it occasionally since, I always considered it a sort of “Perl for statisticians” — a useful swiss-army knife with … Continue reading
Posted in Data Mining, Haskell, Math, Programming, Python, R, Ruby
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Python Debugging with Decorators
I’ve written a little python function which I have found to be very helpful for debugging. It takes a function, and returns a function which is identical to the original except that it prints a message to the console with … Continue reading
Posted in Python
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SimpleDiff in Python
A while ago I posted a PHP implementation of a diff algorithm I came up with1. Since it was well received, and it’s a useful little algorithm to have, I created a Python version as well. There are a few … Continue reading
Posted in Python
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Tail recursion in Python
After spending a lot of time in Scheme, it’s hard not to think in recursion from time to time. When I recently started to improve my Python skills, I missed having Scheme optimize my tail recursive calls. For example, consider … Continue reading
Posted in Python
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Garden Path Sentences
I recently came across an interesting post on the Powerset Blog recently about garden path sentences. Garden path sentences are sentences that lead you down the wrong path through a string of words with multiple meanings. For example, The complex … Continue reading
Posted in Python, Ruby
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