E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX 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.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, 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.

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Stuff I Use

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

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

How not to advocate via Google Code

People sure are excited about the Google App Engine. Especially people who have some other favorite language besides Python. A significant number of the issue tracker items are of the form "Please add support for $MY_LANGUAGE", where $MY_LANGUAGE might be VB.NET, C#, PHP, Java, Groovy, Ruby, Perl, etc. ad nauseam.

I'm not going to comment on the language-wars aspect.

But if you want your language supported (this goes for any issue in the tracker in fact), the thing to do is not to go to one of those issue pages and add a comment that consists of "+1". ("DUGG!!" is also not recommended.) That sends an email to everyone who has "starred" the issue. An email that consists of "+1". With your name on it.

The right thing to do is star the issue yourself. Notice that in the list of issues, there's no column that lets you sort by number of comments, but that the list defaults to sorting by the number of users who have starred it. That's a hint from Google.

A hint that some people have had a hard time taking...

plus one one one eleven

OK, I lied about not commenting on the language wars.

It's pretty widely known that Google has four "official" languages internally: Python, Java, C++, and Javascript. I presume that a lot of the Python infrastructure in GAE is stuff that Google created for their own use. A corollary of this presumption is that the next GAE-supported language is going to come from that list. And it's not going to be C++.

It would be cool if the next language to be added was not a language per se, but broad support for the JVM and languages that live on it -- Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby. That would shut a lot of people up make a lot of people happy, and be technically cool as well.

(But if the next one is Javascript, with Steve Yegge's Rails clone, that would be interesting too!)

Thursday, April 10th, 2008
+ + + + + +
2 comments

Some related posts: From PHP to Python • Array comprehensions in Javascript • Django.June • Liking jQuery • JavaScript and the thickening client • A minimal wiki in Django • WebKit screen-grabbers • The MySpace worm • PyObjC in, Cocoa-Java out • CodeZoo
• Comment from Ian Bicking, later that day

Incidentally, the Rails clone is actually written on Rhino, for the JVM.

What's really awesome about the appengine community: not only +1's, but people are replying to things on the mailing list with just "bump!"

The internet is just full of awesome!

• Comment from Paul, later that day

Bump! That's funny.

I had forgotten about the Rails clone being Rhino-based; thanks for pointing that out. Makes Java/JVM being next seem even more likely.

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