Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

I was able to stop by Holocene this evening for the first half of FOSCON III: Really Radical Ruby. Those crazy kids. The event was sponsored by SQKWZR, which the two founding scientists/emcees claimed was fake – but you know they’re just saying that to keep people from stealing their ideas.

I saw five 10-minute-ish lightning talks before I had to leave and get my beauty rest. Here’s the gist. My apologies in advance to anyone whose presentation details, name, or affiliation I bungle:

Python and WSGI

This morning I took Mark Ramm’s “Modern Web Development with Python and WSGI” tutorial. Mark had people build stuff during class, which was a great way to have these concepts sink in. I successfully built a little WSGI-powered site in just a few minutes. As Chas promised (but I didn’t actually believe him), it’s pretty simple stuff.

For a long while I’ve pointed people to Joe Gregorio’s Robaccia as a way to understand concepts behind web frameworks, and to get a sense of why you shouldn’t just dive in and make your own without grasping those concepts. Ironically, Joe’s “throwaway” framework has refused to die, and now it’s got a home on Google Code.

I’m here in the great city of Portland, Oregon for the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON. Looks like it’s going to be a fun week.

The first two days are for “tutorials”, half-day sessions on specific practical topics. Though you are officially required to sign up for your sessions in advance, sometimes you just need to float. There’s so much going on it can be hard to choose to stay put. Plus you want to make sure you cruise the upper lobby every hour or two in case they put out a fresh batch of cookies. Also, frankly, none of the sessions I sampled in the morning really grabbed me. Not everybody who has written a book is an engaging speaker, alas. My work as a teacher makes me both more understanding and more demanding of presenters.

I was only there for about half of the latest Western Mass. Developer Group meeting, but here are some of the things we rambled on about. Someone else will have to fill the earlier bits.

• Haskell: Should you bother?

Often after one of our Western Mass. Developer Group meetings I want to make a list of things we talked about. This time I actually did it. This only includes stuff I talked about or was within earshot of – minus the top secret material that you can only know about if you show up in person.

• C# structures and their fans and detractors
• BASIC Computer Games, the book
• the Amiga and “guru meditation”. Amiga’s not dead! Again, yet.
• learning assembly language
• the glories of VMS
• help wanted, or at least lacking: Flash, QA, HTML/CSS production
• Making life with Subversion better with svnmerge.py
• Darcs again, plus Mercurial vs. Bazaar. Anything’s better than CVS.
• the glory of the REPL in Ruby and Python
• Free review copies of books for user groups like ours (nice find, Lou!)
• the iPhone – finished writing that Ajax-based Skype client yet?
• the OpenMoko phone (I can’t believe they quoted Andre Gide in a press release)
• Dell shipping policy: “That will take three weeks. OMG WE DID IT IN 8 DAYS DUDE IT’S A MIRACLE”
• MacMall shipping policy: “We’re shipping part of your order on time. Did we mention we don’t have the other part yet? The part with the computer in it?”
• Smalldog, trustworthy Mac merchants
• Drupal, community plumbing
• Trac, even Rails guys dig it
• What do people do with (or think of) your code after you leave your job?
• Crazy UFO photos making the rounds. (My favorite theory after checking the internets is that they are part of a viral marketing campaign for the new Transformers movie)

There was more. It would be neat to have a wiki page for each meeting where we could all dump notes. No pressure on our de facto webmaster implied! But I bet you could whip it up in Rails in, like, 90 seconds.

Back in February I mentioned Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code. Somehow I never got around to posting more extended comments. Recently I was asked, by someone who had followed the Chandler project but hadn’t seen the book, to clarify why I thought the story was sad. This post is a cobbling-together of my answer to that question as well as some comments I made in the course of our group-interview on the Well. (Short of reading the book, you can learn quite a bit about it from the many interviews Scott has given.)

That nifty feature Python stole from Haskell (or was it Erlang?), “list comprehensions”, is found in the latest version of Javascript (available in Firefox 2.0) under the name “array comprehensions”. Cool!

via John Resig.