Very cool news – Mercurial 1.0 has been released. See the announcement and the site for details. There are no earth-shaking individual changes in this release, just a long list of improvements that have been made since 0.9.5.

One of the new features is easy_install friendliness, so assuming you’ve got that installed, getting the new version of Mercurial is as easy as:

$ sudo easy_install http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/release/mercurial-1.0.tar.gz

If you want to be kind to the server, since it’s getting pounded today, you can do this instead in order to make your request via the Coral CDN:

Tonight we had a special edition of the Western Mass. Developers’ Group as Rich Hickey made the long trek north to talk to us about Clojure, his functional Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM.

I enjoyed Rich’s presentation a lot. He’s clearly a very smart guy with very focused goals for the language. He breezed through the basic Clojure intro stuff to get to slides and a demo app focused specifically on concurrency issues. He walked us through almost every piece of the example app, a simple graphical simulation a couple hundred lines long. Remarkably, given that I have almost no non-toy experience with Lisp or Java, I found it mostly understandable.

Update: As of 2012, the primary Django repo is on GitHub. The mirror described in this post has been retired.

I really enjoyed my participation in the last Django sprint, but prior commitments prevent me from participating in the PyCon Django sprint that begins today. On the chance that people may be taking advantage of my Mercurial mirror of the Django repository, I made a couple tweaks:

• Increased the update frequency from hourly to every 15 minutes
• Added downloadable gzipped tarballs (about 2.5MB for trunk).

Have fun!

A former colleague from my days in print design (and a wonderfully loyal reader of my blog to boot) writes to ask whether he should learn Python. He’s a smart guy with a deep background in typography, publishing, and the Mac. He is not a programmer by trade, but has taught himself enough PHP to build a custom CMS for his newspaper. He writes:

I’ve invested so much time in PHP, and am quite proficient now (not bad for it being more of an avocation), but I respect your opinion and for a long time have wondered about switching.

Just in time for Pycon, material from our new book is now available on the Safari “Rough Cuts” service. If you’re a Safari subscriber, or decide to become one to get access to our draft chapters, please check it out and let us know what you think! Reader comments are incredibly important to us.

We have a title now – Python Web Development with Django – and we’re even listed on Amazon.