Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Aug 23)

[Peter Otten]

QOTW: "Lucky for me I found python before Java took over my brain." - Huy
"Python fits my brain" - c.l.py proverb

"So as far as I'm concerned, SOAP is not XML, nor is it useful to even a
fraction of the degree to which it is destructive." - Uche Ogbuji


Over the weekend Andrea Griffini has implemented a toy Basic
interpreter in Python, inspired by a post of Leif K-Brooks. A few
other languages are also available.
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

Jeff Epler and Martin von Loewis help Vincent Delft to overcome the lack
of encoding-awareness in the zip file format.
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

As of June 2004, Pythonology has a few new success stories.
http://www.pythonology.com/success

Python people are nice, says Andy Todd.
http://www.halfcooked.com/mt/archives/000833.html

Something new from the decorator front:
Paul McGuire initates another decorator poll and a new keyword
followed by a suite seems to emerge as a viable contender with a small
chance to beat the pie syntax.
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

Thanks to the work of Michael Sparks building on previous efforts
by Mark Russell there is already a patch. Anthony Baxter, the
outspoken proponent of the pie syntax, helps with some useful hints,
too.
http://www.python.org/sf/1013835

Robert Brewer volunteers to "sell" the result to GvR.
http://www.aminus.org/rbre/python/pydec.html

Too old/too young is no excuse for not learning Python, according to
a thread started by Lucas Raab, asking for the
"Age of Python programmers"
with the only word of caution,
"Not yet, but our day will come"
being uttered by Robey Holderith.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=5f4805189aa2470d


========================================================================
Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in
these pages:

Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional
center of Pythonia
http://www.python.org
Notice especially the master FAQ
http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html

PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the
marvelous daily python url
http://www.pythonware.com/daily
Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html
While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL
are utterly different in their technologies and generally in
their results.

comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software. Be
sure to scan this newsgroup weekly.
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce

Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by
Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of intelligently summarizing
action on the python-dev mailing list once every other week.
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/

The Python Package Index catalogues packages.
http://www.python.org/pypi/

The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects references
to all sorts of Python resources.
http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/

Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
mailing lists
http://www.python.org/sigs/

The Python Business Forum "further the interests of companies
that base their business on ... Python."
http://www.python-in-business.org

Python Success Stories--from air-traffic control to on-line
match-making--can inspire you or decision-makers to whom you're
subject with a vision of what the language makes practical.
http://www.pythonology.com/success

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python
Consortium as an independent nexus of activity. It has official
responsibility for Python's development and maintenance.
http://www.python.org/psf/
Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation.
http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html

Cetus collects Python hyperlinks.
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html

Python FAQTS
http://python.faqts.com/

The Cookbook is a collaborative effort to capture useful and
interesting recipes.
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python

Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available are
http://www.python.org/channews.rdf
http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/pythonware_com_daily.pcgi
http://python.de/backend.php
For more, see
http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=python&ShowStatus=all
The old Python "To-Do List" now lives principally in a
SourceForge reincarnation.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse
http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html

The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com.
(e-mail address removed) and (e-mail address removed)
welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding
of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.

*Py: the Journal of the Python Language*
http://www.pyzine.com

Archive probing tricks of the trade:
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100
http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site=groups&group=comp.lang.python.*

Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/
http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant)
or
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python


Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
E-mail to <[email protected]> should get through.

To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning
(approximately), ask <[email protected]> to subscribe. Mention
"Python-URL!".


-- The Python-URL! Team--

Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Python-URL!" project.

 

[Anthony Baxter]

Thanks to the work of Michael Sparks building on previous efforts
by Mark Russell there is already a patch. Anthony Baxter, the
outspoken proponent of the pie syntax, helps with some useful hints,
too.
http://www.python.org/sf/1013835

.... just to correct the record - my efforts here have not been
primarily aimed at defending the pie-syntax, but instead aimed at
shaking out a decent response. I'm trying _very_ hard to make sure
that any efforts to go back to Guido are "done right". After the
horror of the ternary operators debacle, I'm trying to make sure that
community involvement doesn't end up with a complete bum rap.

As part of this, of course, I _have_ defended the pie-syntax, because
it's the best I've seen so far. But if something better comes along,
I'm happy to go with that.

My major problems, btw, remaining with the J2 syntax are the choice of
the new keyword seems an extremely problematic thing, and the simple
case of a single decorator results in far more clutter. But these are
purely subjective judgements. (Hell, this entire discussion is now
pretty much based on subjective or aesthetic judgements).

 

[Peter Hansen]

(Hell, this entire discussion is now
pretty much based on subjective or aesthetic judgements).

Excellent! If that's true, it really has reached the stage
where it's ready for the BDFL's pronouncement. Having the
slaves do all the hard work and having the BDFL only have
to weigh the subjective and aesthetic issues is probably
exactly how the process should work, and should still
result in a Python that is a consistent and coherent whole. **

-Peter

** Words like "slaves" and any phrasing above that might
seem offensive should be interpreted entirely in a light-
hearted manner for purposes of this posting.

 

[Anthony Baxter]

Just to backtrack on this a _little_ - I'm talking about the
block-before-def and pie-syntaxes here. There's still a bunch of
others forms that are _completely_ awful on technical grounds. I
really can't be bothered arguing over the "J2" vs "A1" syntaxes,
though.

Excellent! If that's true, it really has reached the stage
where it's ready for the BDFL's pronouncement. Having the
slaves do all the hard work and having the BDFL only have
to weigh the subjective and aesthetic issues is probably
exactly how the process should work, and should still
result in a Python that is a consistent and coherent whole. **

Yep. That's one of the nice things about the BDFL school of language
design - pointless bickering over syntax, which would otherwise not
end until the universe implodes, can be handpassed to Guido.

(In addition, of course, you also end up with a much better result
than you would if a committee designed it)

 

[Peter Otten]

... just to correct the record - my efforts here have not been
primarily aimed at defending the pie-syntax, but instead aimed at
shaking out a decent response. I'm trying _very_ hard to make sure
that any efforts to go back to Guido are "done right". After the
horror of the ternary operators debacle, I'm trying to make sure that
community involvement doesn't end up with a complete bum rap.

I made no assumptions about your motives in the above snippet, so this is
not a correction, strictly speaking.

As part of this, of course, I _have_ defended the pie-syntax, because
it's the best I've seen so far. But if something better comes along,
I'm happy to go with that.

The fraction of your posts I have read went from (I'm sharpening)
"What crap are you proposing as an alternative to '@'? Guido won't listen
anyway" to "If you want it, at least get it right"
I liked that and that's why you are in the Python-URL.

My major problems, btw, remaining with the J2 syntax are the choice of
the new keyword seems an extremely problematic thing, and the simple
case of a single decorator results in far more clutter. But these are
purely subjective judgements. (Hell, this entire discussion is now
pretty much based on subjective or aesthetic judgements).

Yes, and I am clearly among those who from the beginning where more
concerned about the aesthetical impact on the language than the technical
details that affect the actual implementation.
But even if I wanted, the formal constraints of the Python-URL make it hard
to use it as a means of propaganda...

Peter

 

[Anthony Baxter]

The fraction of your posts I have read went from (I'm sharpening)
"What crap are you proposing as an alternative to '@'? Guido won't listen
anyway" to "If you want it, at least get it right"
I liked that and that's why you are in the Python-URL.

That's probably a way of reading it - although I think my original
"Guido won't listen" were more probably "Guido doesn't care about
people voting that they hate a syntax". Dictators are like that.

And yes, some of my posts could probably be interpreted as "what crap is this?"

On the other hand, I've been really quite impressed how much useful
effort has been channelled out what were initially quite rabid posts
(on both sides <wink>) into a useful result (the J2 paper, the J2
implementation). It speaks positively about the python community that
this was done, and done, by and large, without much participation from
any of the existing python developers[1].

Regardless of what result comes out of this, I think that this has
been a good thing - as I think I commented earlier in this thread,
after the mega-horror of the ternary operators meltdown, it's good to
see from the point of view of community involvement in the language.

[1] I don't count my snarking as a particularly useful form of
participation - more a combination of trying to keep people honest and
my normal contrariness.

 

[Cameron Laird]

.
.
. .
.
.
I made no assumptions about your motives in the above snippet, so this is
not a correction, strictly speaking. .
.
.
But even if I wanted, the formal constraints of the Python-URL make it hard
to use it as a means of propaganda...

Peter

However we taxonomize individual sentences, it's ALWAYS in
the spirit of "Python-URL!" to inspire more precision and
clarification. Peter's done tremendous work for many weeks
distilling megabytes of traffic into concise, accurate,
understandable descriptions. Any help we get refining or
elaborating those descriptions is all to the good.

 

[Jeff Shannon]

[1] I don't count my snarking as a particularly useful form of
participation - more a combination of trying to keep people honest and
my normal contrariness.

On the contrary, I'd say that your commentary has had a very useful
effect, even if only by defining a target for those who were interested
in actually *doing* something as opposed to just complaining. It's only
by shifting gears to aim for that target that anything useful (the J2
implementation and paper) came about.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International