Posts tagged: PYTHON

As a Palm-wielding Python guy, I took news of the Python port for the iPod as another cruel slap. I use Pippy, but being Python 1.5.2 it’s pretty limited. The increased power (and screen real estate) of the TX over previous Palms I’ve had has made me more desirous of having an actual programming environment. There are ports for Zaurus, EPOC, and Nokia Series 60 phones (which I mentioned last summer). It’s sinking in that things aren’t likely to change until the faraway Linux-based PalmOS arrives.

I quietly launched my first production Django site today, a replacement for a mess of legacy third-party PHP code. Unfortunately, it’s a members-only service related to my job and so I don’t have a public URL to share.

A couple interesting points: the new site was developed alongside the still-live legacy PHP apps, using some of the same data – including a user table that’s used for authentication. django-admin.py inspectdb made model creation fairly easy. I also found Scott Hurring’s PHPSerialize module indispensible for working with the highly crufty legacy data.

In November I wrote about rediscovering BASIC Computer Games, a book I had when I was learning programming in the ’80s. Flipping through it recently I came across a simple game called “Reverse”:

The game of REVERSE requires you to arrange a list of numbers in numerical order from left to right. To move, you tell the computer how many numbers (counting from the left) to reverse. For example, if the current list is 2 3 4 5 1 6 7 8 9 and you reverse 4, the result will be 5 4 3 2 1 6 7 8 9. Now if you reverse 5, you win.

A few days ago the first 1.0 beta of IronPython was released.

If you’ve been wondering about IronPython you should definitely check out Jim Hugunin’s screencast from November (use the direct link to the video if you are on a Mac). If I were a Windows developer, I’d be really excited by this. In particular being able to use the Avalon GUI framework from Python seems very slick and simple. The integration with Visual Studio for debugging is quite nice too.

Released today: web.py. (Source, documentation, backstory.)

Even though everybody (including Aaron) refers to this as a framework, it’s a lot more library-like than most of the frameworks it’s ostensibly competing with – by design, it seems. It’s very compact – only about 1000 lines of fairly dense Python. (About 275 of those are a template for pretty error pages adapted from Django though.)

Personally, I find the compact, all-in-one style very appealing. Less for a newbie to absorb and less for an experienced user to keep track of. Yes, it does require a template engine and a database wrapper to be useful, but the core is still extremely lean.

Looking at this ticket, endorsed by Subway creator Peter Hunt and this post by Turbogears creator Kevin Dangoor, there’s clearly a non-zero chance that these two frameworks – which are, as I noted in my initial post on Turbogears, very similar architecturally – will join forces.

I agree with Kevin that “saving Python from Ruby” or whatever is not a goal worth focusing on. But focusing developer momentum behind a demonstrably popular web framework model is.

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, is now working at Google. Very cool, especially given Google’s longstanding love of Python.