Ideas for master's thesis

[Filip Gruszczyński]

Hello there,

I am student of CS at the University of Warsaw, currently 4th year. I
am attending Object Oriented Programming seminar and it is about time,
I started looking for an idea of my master's degree project. As I like
Python very much, I would like to do something with this language, yet
I don't know if there are any needs/science fields, that could be used
as a basis for a thesis. Therefore I would like to ask, if there is
any way to access any person involved in development, who would help
me find some field that need to be developed/researched (rather the
first one) and would be close enough to the OOP, so I could present it
to a mentor (he is cool with doing something for OSS community).

 

[miller.paul.w]

I am student of CS at the University of Warsaw, currently 4th year. I
am attending Object Oriented Programming seminar and it is about time,
I started looking for an idea of my master's degree project. As I like
Python very much, I would like to do something with this language, yet
I don't know if there are any needs/science fields, that could be used
as a basis for a thesis.

I'm sure you could probably find something having to do with Pypy
(http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/home.html) that would be both
manageable and significant enough to warrant a Master's thesis.

 

[Alan Isaac]

I am student of CS at the University of Warsaw, currently 4th year. I
am attending Object Oriented Programming seminar and it is about time,
I started looking for an idea of my master's degree project. As I like
Python very much, I would like to do something with this language, yet
I don't know if there are any needs/science fields, that could be used
as a basis for a thesis. Therefore I would like to ask, if there is
any way to access any person involved in development, who would help
me find some field that need to be developed/researched (rather the
first one) and would be close enough to the OOP, so I could present it
to a mentor (he is cool with doing something for OSS community).

There has been discussion of replacing/supplementing the
NumPy matrix class. The newmatrix class would still
subclass ndarray but would handle indexing differently.
I am confident that you could get a lot of guidance on the
NumPy list if you were interested in taking this on.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac

 

[George Sakkis]

Hello there,

I am student of CS at the University of Warsaw, currently 4th year. I
am attending Object Oriented Programming seminar and it is about time,
I started looking for an idea of my master's degree project. As I like
Python very much, I would like to do something with this language, yet
I don't know if there are any needs/science fields, that could be used
as a basis for a thesis. Therefore I would like to ask, if there is
any way to access any person involved in development, who would help
me find some field that need to be developed/researched (rather the
first one) and would be close enough to the OOP, so I could present it
to a mentor (he is cool with doing something for OSS community).

Check out the running thread about the lack of data hiding and try to
add such a mechanism, preferably as a pure python add-on package ala
zope.interface (only half-joking ;-))

George

 

[janislaw]

I'm sure you could probably find something having to do with Pypy
(http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/home.html) that would be both
manageable and significant enough to warrant a Master's thesis.

The Pypy will fade out. You can for example write a compiler for LISP
to CPython bytecode. Fits well for a master thesis.

Regards,
Jan Wicijowski

 

[Larry Bugbee]

I would like to do something with this language, yet

I don't know if there are any needs/science fields, that could be used
as a basis for a thesis.

Personally, I'd like to see *optional* data typing added to Python
perhaps along the lines of what was done in Pyrex. You declare the
data type when you know it, or when it matters, and skip it
otherwise. Your paper could analyze its pros and cons, analyze any
potential performance gains, and recommend how to implement it. Your
professor will suggest some additional questions.

I suspect, if the type be known and declared, the interpreter could be
streamlined and quicker, you might get asserts for free, and perhaps,
Python becomes even more self-documenting. Perhaps I've missed it,
but I haven't seen a strong analytical case made for or against
optional data typing. Your paper?

Larry

 

[Andrii V. Mishkovskyi]

Personally, I'd like to see *optional* data typing added to Python
perhaps along the lines of what was done in Pyrex. You declare the
data type when you know it, or when it matters, and skip it
otherwise. Your paper could analyze its pros and cons, analyze any
potential performance gains, and recommend how to implement it. Your
professor will suggest some additional questions.

I suspect, if the type be known and declared, the interpreter could be
streamlined and quicker, you might get asserts for free, and perhaps,
Python becomes even more self-documenting. Perhaps I've missed it,
but I haven't seen a strong analytical case made for or against
optional data typing. Your paper?

I think what you are talking about is already implemented in Python
3.0 as annotations. Forgive me if I missed your point.

 

[Edward Bugbee]

I think what you are talking about is already implemented in Python
3.0 as annotations. Forgive me if I missed your point.

Close. I haven't followed Python 3 features that closely so had to go
back and read about annotations. If my read is correct, annotations
address only arguments and return values and do not affect runtime
code. They are there, principally, for documentation and library
argument checking purposes. That's a start.

In addition to arguments, I'd like the ability to optionally declare
the types for local and global variables, and going beyond doc and
external lib checking, I'd like to see the declarations affect the
compilation, potentially sidestepping runtime type checking. I
suspect performance could be improved if the intrepreter could make
some assumptions and not have to check type and every time. But, that
is a guess on my part and a paper doing a deeper analysis might prove
or disprove the hypothesis. (A good analysis would be non-trivial
which is why I'm thinking it could be a good Master's Project/Thesis.)

Larry

 

[MRAB]

Personally, I'd like to see *optional* data typing added to Python
perhaps along the lines of what was done in Pyrex. You declare the
data type when you know it, or when it matters, and skip it
otherwise. Your paper could analyze its pros and cons, analyze any
potential performance gains, and recommend how to implement it. Your
professor will suggest some additional questions.

I suspect, if the type be known and declared, the interpreter could be
streamlined and quicker, you might get asserts for free, and perhaps,
Python becomes even more self-documenting. Perhaps I've missed it,
but I haven't seen a strong analytical case made for or against
optional data typing. Your paper?

You might want to have a look at Boo at http://boo.codehaus.org/.