Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

This evening, the Western Mass. Developers Group was treated to a talk by Ben Fry of Processing fame. It was excellent and inspiring. Having not much prior exposure to Processing or his work, I left hungry for more. (The title of this post is taken from the name of the group at the MIT Media Lab where Fry did his PhD work.)

I liked the graphical-REPL flavor of his live demos. Surprisingly, the feeling reminded me of being a kid flipping through Alan Kay’s article about the Xerox Alto in Scientific American 30 years ago.

When I created dpaste, I tried to make it both a simple browser-based tool and a simple RESTful API. With very little work you could write a script that created a new paste item with a single POST.

Over the life of the site a few people have discovered and played with that “secret” API. I’ve now made it a bit more official. The new API has its own URL (versioned, even!) and is more tolerant of missing data, just like the web form.

“I’m a PHP programmer and I want to check out this Django thing. What should I do?”

I’ve been seeing this kind of question pop up more and more, and I have a few answers.

First-hand experience as well as many conversations with developers online have led me to the same conclusion: the curious person behind such a question should be encouraged and assisted. (I’ll call that person “Pat” for the rest of the post, for convenience and conscientious gender-neutrality.)

There are connections between programming and my favorite ice cream.

In our new book on Django, I used the sentence “My favorite ice cream is Herrell’s” in some example code where I needed text – a tribute to my favorite local ice cream parlor.

Walking by Herrell’s this afternoon, I saw Steve Herrell inside. Because I had a copy of my book with me, I decided I’d see if he wanted to take a quick look at the code snippet. He did. He took this odd testimonial with grace and good humor, and thanked me.

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.