My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.
I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.
This runs on Django, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.
Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii
At least 59034 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.
Syntactically significant whitespace is one of those debating points frequently raised in unproductive language thrashes involving Python. One persistent implication made by SSW-haters is that it's a freakish mutation unique to Python. Or, if they're feeling particularly vicious, they'll bring up Fortran. Cold comfort.
In fact, there are quite a few other languages that have gone down this path. Flipping through a big fat book that I bought because Steve Yegge recommended it, I came across mention of a couple that were new to me. Then I went digging for more. Here's an incomplete list:
In my searches I came across the term "off-side-rule languages", which I hadn't heard before, though apparently some people use it. I think it's a clunker. And "syntactically significant whitespace" is too much of a mouthful, and imprecise to boot (after all, whitespace between tokens is fairly significant!).
I think the field is open for a zippy marketing term. How about Spacejax? Space 2.0? Hmm, this is harder than I thought...
I don't know how you gathered your data, but neither SML nor OCaml have any more significant whitespace than a language like C. So listing "ML" as a whitespace-signficant language is wrong.
Not sure how ML ended up in there; I've removed it. Thanks for the heads-up.
As for "the whitespace thing for OCaml", try following the link!
Comments use Markdown syntax. Your comment will not appear until approved, which may take a few hours or more. Spammers will be torpedoed.
SPF-enabled spam domains
1 comment
Chess via iPod
2 comments
Aesthetics and computation
2 comments
robots.txt via Django, in one line
4 comments
zoot
Offsite, online backup: rsync.net
16 days ago
Craig
Bicycle Repair Man bundle for TextMate
24 days ago
Fazal Majid
SPF-enabled spam domains
29 days ago
Adrian Holovaty
Chess via iPod
53 days ago
Alexander Kahn
Aesthetics and computation
58 days ago
Copyright 2009
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media
new buzz words are hard to come up with, but one of the rules is that you can't reuse parts of other terms. (i.e. spacejax => space + 'ajax'[1:]). It's often common to create an acronym (i.e. ajax). That said, i nominate LUSS => 'Languages Using Significant Spacing'