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I just finalized my payment for pycon! I'll be heading in Thursday and leaving Monday. I had to skip tutorials this year, but I should be able to stay for Brett's "Core Spint Tutorial".
Also, I put "Jesse instance has no attribute 'badge'" on my badge. I'm going to be the coolest kid in school. Although "TypeError: Duck" would have been more succinct.
Per Doug and Brian:February issue of Python Magazine now available: "The February issue of Python Magazine is available for download now.
The stories for this month look great - I have to settle down and get my life in good enough order to spin out another few articles and finish all of my other projects.
Here's an article posted on CIO.com entitled:You Used Python to Write WHAT? Pros/Cons of Python for Enterprise Use.
It's a decent piece - there's a statement I'm stuck mulling over:
Furthermore, the power and expressivity that Python offers means that it may require more skilled developers. Java or C# are more restrictive by design, forcing programmers to adhere to stricter rules around type safety and interface compliance. For some, that hinders productivity. For others, it reduces mistakes or accidents of design.
The question I'm mulling over is the one of "does the flexibility of Python mean that only more skilled developers"? If you change the word "skilled" to "disciplined" it dramatically changes the meaning and context of the question.
I said this to someone the other day - a compiler doesn't make illogical code logical.
Oh well, back to crunch-time and moving prep.
Found this gem on the cheeseshop: Fabric 0.0.3. The original blog post by the author outlining the why and wherefore is here.
I have about four or five tools like this I use at work, mostly home-rolled, seeing something like this out and in the open is great, and the fact he used paramiko as a back-end is great.
Maybe it's time to switch out my various little tools and move to this.
Circling back through my post queue - here's a Dr. Dobbs article on Concurrency and Python, in it Shannon covers stackless and greenlets. Good read.
In it he goes into a bit more details about the scheduling system, locking and threads vs. processes.
It started with this post by Bill Burke - it's slanted against dynamic languages (or rather, against the assertions many dynamic language fans make) followed by this post by Steve Vinoski who debates/counters the points Bill makes.
Interesting reads, both of them.
I think this just got added to my essential... uh... reading list? Thomas Guest does a pretty good breakdown of "must reads" for python: Thomas Guest: Essential Python Reading List It's a really well thought-out reading list.
Off the top of my head I would have added:
A sensationalist title, summary and normal slashdot commenters: "Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible"
I get more insightful commentary and discussions on Ron Paul articles from Digg. :|
edit to add: Martijn Faassen calls me out for calling out the headline. I understand his points and his present (and past) concerns, there is some validity to approaching this (the future, py3k) with caution.
Microsoft just announced what has been rumored forever: a formal offer for Yahoo. Microsoft's proposal to Yahoo's board of directors represents $31 per share (a 62% premium over yesterday's closing price) or about $44.6 Billion. Steve Ballmer, CEO and big fan of developers, says, "We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market."
Whoa. This insane. But if it goes through it's good news for a few friends of mine. Makes me kick myself for not buying Yahoo stock :)
Another question for the 'web - what's the "best" python code you've seen - and I don't mean things like gratuitous use of list comps and lambas. I'm asking for more what module/tool/code have you seen that displays all of python's best attributes - readability, simplicity, power coupled with excellent programming practices, i.e: docs, tests, PEP8 compliance, etc?
Obviously, what constitutes "beautiful code" varies for people - some people get their happiness from writing obfuscated code, others find anything involving more than one line of code an affront to their deity.
Given that code is more often read than written: What code do you like reading the most?
as a side note: I was making an analogy that houses are like code bases - filled with creative engineering, latent defects, etc to Brett, and rhetorically asked "but how many code bases have toilets". Brett had an answer: According to Google code, about 7000.
