Miphanies

Missing out on simple things in life.

Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

How do you launch WordPad on a Windows computer?

With Windows 10, you press the Win-key and type WordPad. But there’s one more way. At the command prompt, you typewrite and press the Enter key. WordPad opens. In fact, you don’t even have to open the command window. You can run the write command in the Run panel (Win-key + R) and WordPad starts.

I didn’t know until recently that the command for WordPad is ‘write’, though I have used Windows right from version 3.0. I discovered this feature when I was looking up information on the web about Wordpad settings.

We miss out on simple things even in those areas where we spent a lot of years. When we discover them, the moment is a mix of pleasant surprise and kind of a mild epiphany.

An epiphany is that A-ha moment when one has a sudden and great revelation of a life-changing realization. So, strictly speaking, I am not talking of epiphanies. I’m talking about very simple things that we haven’t noticed or known, until one fine day, we suddenly discover them despite spending a few years around those very same simple things. For lack of a proper word, I am calling such a moment of discovery as miphany; a word I coined for this article by combining minor and epiphany.

I will mention a few more miphanies.

I recently started giving talks and teaching classes on Python and Data Science. One of my students asked me about the ‘for-else’ loop. I don’t remember the exact question, but I remember my answer: there is no such thing, do you mean the if-else block? No, she said, I’m asking about the for-else loop and showed me the example in the course textbook.

Flabbergasted is a mild word for my emotion in that split second. In my nearly three decades of programming experience, I didn’t realize programming languages could have such a construct. It was a miphany moment.

Here’s the code (it runs):

k = 0
for i in range(1, 5):
    k += 2
    print k
else:
    print 'The for loop is over’

I also realized that the while loop can also have an else block.

On another day, I was lecturing on object-oriented concepts. I covered classes, constructors and other aspects of object-oriented programming with Python. One student who was listening silently and intently throughout the class of nearly two hours asked me a simple question: What about destructors?

My immediate response was: ‘No, Python does not have a destructor. Why does it need a destructor? As I have already told you, python programs run on a virtual machine. Programming languages that run on virtual machines do not have the destructor as the VMs do garbage collection’.

Back home, after the class, I looked up my 1540-page hard-bound copy of Learning Python, just to make sure that I was not wrong. It was a miphany yet again.

Python does have a destructor.

Here’s the explanation from the book:

…, the destructor method __del__, is run automatically when an instance’s space is being reclaimed (i.e., at “garbage collection” time ).
For one thing, destructors may not be as useful in Python as they are in some other OOP languages. Because Python automatically reclaims all memory space held by an instance when the instance is reclaimed, destructors are not necessary for space management.

On another occasion, I was preparing notes for a data science lecture and was compiling the definitions of some key terms. A miphany happened with the term ‘event’. In normal usage, event is a singular noun. But in statistics, it has a plural connotation and I kept wondering for a few minutes that I hadn’t internalized the plurality.

The book, Probability and Statistics (SCHAUM’s outlines), 4th edition, defines event as:

An event is a subset A of the sample space S, i.e., it is a set of possible outcomes. If the outcome of an experiment is an element of A, we say that the event A has occurred. An event consisting of a single point of S is often called a simple or elementary event.

My experience shows that miphanies happen when you are seeking information or when teaching, the latter case being more frequent. As the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca said: docendo discimus (by teaching, we learn). You will have many miphanies that will make teaching more and more enjoyable.