Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

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

Just wanted to post a quick note that I’m now publishing an experimental Mercurial mirror of the Django source code repository, including all tags and branches and even the djangoproject.com website source itself. Tom Tobin at The Onion has been maintaining a similar mirror of Django trunk for a while (and very helpfully answered some of my questions in IRC), but I wanted to do the whole tree.

Python has two seemingly similar sequence types, tuples and lists.

The difference between the two that people notice right away, besides literal syntax (parentheses vs. square brackets), is that tuples are immutable and lists are mutable. Unfortunately, because this distinction is strictly enforced by the Python runtime, some other more interesting differences in application tend to get overshadowed.

One common summary of these more interesting, if subtle, differences is that tuples are heterogeneous and lists are homogeneous. In other words:

I just learned that TIOBE (who maintain a popular but controversial listing of programming language popularity statistics) declared Python the “language of 2007”. Most notably, it is now (according to TIOBE) more popular than Perl:

Last month Python surpassed Perl for the first time in history, which is an indication that Python has become the “de facto” glue language at system level. It is especially beloved by system administrators and build managers. Chances are high that Python’s star will rise further in 2008, thanks to the upcoming release of Python 3.

Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant. Links and commentary:

• The Talk Like a Pirate Day site was a victim of its own success this year. After several hours of record-breaking traffic, Chris nobly disabled the site to protect paying customers on the server. I’m looking forward to the white paper, “How to serve one million unique visitors one day per year”. We also heard the origin story of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the site. I hadn’t realized what a pioneer and international pirate celebrity Chris was.

Lately I’ve been trying out the Mercurial distributed version control system on some real projects.

I currently use Subversion for production stuff at work. It’s reliable, has great Trac integration, and is most likely to be known by other developers. (In fact, we hired a new person at work this fall who will be helping me with web development, and it turned out that Subversion was what he was familiar with. So I feel vindicated on that last point especially.)