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Apfel#

🍎 apfel stands for A Python Functional Extras Library, which provides a set of quality-of-life utilities designed for agile experiments.

Trivia

Apfel is the Deutsch word for apple.

Motivation#

Python is not inherently a functional programming language. However, functional style can often lead to clearer and more concise code.

To fulfill my personal needs of writing elegant (and possibly efficient) code for evolving in an agile way (i.e. research oriented, iterative, and exploratory), and to avoid pulling in less-maintained or less-documented third-party libraries, a personal small toolkit is a better choice.

It provides common helper functions, data types and containers that aim to counter the missing features and design flaws of Python language itself. Heavy use of meta-programming, type hints and of course, functional programming techniques, are expected.

Design Goals#

  • Unpythonic. Use best practices and API naming conventions from other languages, especially Rust, Haskell, R, and Julia to mitigate Python's limitations. Go is also a good reference for simplicity and readability comparable to Python.

  • Type safe. Add expressive and sound type hints whenever possible.

  • Low cost abstraction. Try to use the most efficient underlying implementation.

  • Minimal dependencies. The library is kept (almost) self-contained, except those listed inside dependencies.

Acknowledgement#

The apple logo used in the document is from the Noto Color Emoji font by Google.