Kevin Altis: Python

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 21:19:09 GMT

Python is an Agile programming language!

There, I said it, so now everyone can stop using terms like scripting and interpreted or high-level that either have negative connotations or don't really get across why Python is so great. Just say Python is an agile programming language. Note that Java and C# are not agile languages, but that Ruby probably is based on what I know about Ruby. If you use Jython with Java that also counts as agile.

Ward Cunningham and I came up with the idea of calling Python an agile language during an evening get-together on March 14th with Brian Ingerson. We tried using the term all evening and it seemed to work. Since then, I've brought it up with people at PyCon and other events and everyone seems to like the term. It looks like we have a winner.

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 17:24:54 GMT

Python 11 - OSCON 2003 Registration

The registration page for Python 11 at OSCON 2003 is now available. The conference takes place July 7 - 11, 2003 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/register.html

The theme of OSCON this year is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software".

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention brings together the leaders of more than nine critical open source technologies. You will get an inside look at how to configure, optimize, code, and manage these powerful tools. The convention is rooted in a single premise -- to provide high-quality information that will allow you to raise your level of expertise and overcome challenges quickly, efficiently, and elegantly.

The conference sessions, including the Python tutorials (Monday, Tuesday) and presentations (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) are available at:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/tutorial_python.html

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/track_python.html

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/tutorials.html

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/sessions.html

OSCON Home page:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003/

I will repeat this announcement, provide additional information, and post updates at least once a month between now and July.

ka
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Kevin Altis - Python 11 co-chair

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 17:50:55 GMT

Blogging PyCon?

If you're planning to attend PyCon next week and update your blog while you're there, let people know so we can make a PyCon news page of sorts. I already made a post about this on comp.lang.python which has been mirrored to the python-list mailing list.

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 18:53:09 GMT

Official Python Blog?

Should we have an official Python weblog as part of www.python.org?

Fredrik Lundh's Daily Python-URL has been around a long time and does an excellent job of highlighting some of the things happening in the world of Python, but there are also a lot of things that don't appear. There is a Python Programmer Weblogs meta-blog that covers a lot more, but has the problem of not being 100% focused on Python issues, plus you tend to see a bit of duplication as people blogroll posts. There are some meta-blog lists on the PyZine home page just above the PyZine weblogs.

The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL provides a weekly summary of happenings on comp.lang.python. comp.lang.python.announce covers new module releases and other announcements, but there is no RSS feed, it isn't updated every day, and again there are Python articles and other happenings that simply get missed.

www.python.org already has a number of RDF/RSS files. There is an RSS file for the Python Package Index (PyPI). There is also an RSS feed for the Python wiki RecentChanges page. Finally, there is an channews.rdf file originally done for Netscape, which is generated from the data file, channews.dat.

So, I just want to get this idea out there and see what other people think about whether we should have one, what items would and wouldn't appear in it. We should probably skip the implementation for now. You can email me directly with comments or post a follow-up on the blog and I'll summarize for the marketing-python mailing list where I first brought up this idea.

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 02:29:24 GMT

Python 2.3a2

The second alpha release of Python 2.3 is available.

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 02:18:21 GMT

Python Scripting for .NET

Brian Lloyd has posted his "initial (experimental) version" of Python Scripting for .NET along with a FAQ. It is described as an integration of the CPython runtime with the .NET CLR.

This is different than the KOBRA .NET for Python wrapper by Chetan Gadgil.

Neither of these should be confused with Visual Python, which has nothing to do with running Python in the CLR or integrating with .NET, but rather:

Visual Python is the high-productivity Python plug-in for Visual Studio .NET. Powerful, Python-specific features within the familiar Visual Studio environment provide ease of use and accelerated development cycles.

Yeah, I'm still a bit confused too ;-) Anyway, I don't use .NET or the Visual Studio .NET IDE so I have nothing more to add.

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 04:03:53 GMT

Paint Shop Pro 8 Public Beta

Paint Shop Pro 8 for Windows uses Python as its scripting engine. Below is an excerpt from the readme file.

PSP 8 has a full blown scripting engine, based on the Python programming language. Though you can use Python to write scripts from scratch, in general there is no need to do so. PSP includes a script recorder, and virtually everything in the application can be recorded. Scripting functionality is primarily accessed either through the scripting toolbar or through the Script submenu of the file menu. From there you can record, pause recording, save recordings, and play, edit or cancel scripts.

Bravo Jasc Software! The readme goes on to give more details about editing Python scripts in case you want to get more advanced as well as the security implications of using scripts from untrusted sources.

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 16:12:29 GMT

A Conversion with Guido van Rossum

The full set of interviews done with Guido back in July are now available.

In Part I: The Making of Python, van Rossum describes Python's history, major influences, and design goals.
In Part II: Python's Design Goals, van Rossum talks about Python's original design goals—how he originally intended Python to "bridge the gap between the shell and C," and how it eventually became used on large-scale applications.
In Part III: Programming at Python Speed, van Rossum discusses the source of Python's famed programmer productivity and the joys of exploring new territory with code.
In Part IV: Contracts in Python, van Rossum discusses the nature of contracts in a runtime typed programming language such as Python.
In Part V: Strong versus Weak Typing, van Rossum discusses the robustness of systems built with strongly and weakly typed languages, the value of testing, and whether he'd fly on an all-Python plane.
In Part VI: Designing with the Python Community, van Rossum discusses the importance of "pythonic" API design, the usefulness of intuiting performance, the value of experience and community feedback in design decisions, and the process of deciding how to evolve Python's standard library.

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 19:07:23 GMT

A message for the five people that read this blog. The deadline for submitting a proposal to Python 11/OSCON 2003 is tomorrow, February 15th!

Note to self, get a larger readership.

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 08:20:10 GMT

Refactoring the Business

Jon Udell posted a nice piece titled Refactoring the Business as a follow-up to last week's Shipping the Prototype. I've spent a lot of time with Ward Cunningham the last couple of weeks, talking about many of these issues and doing some pair programming in Python on his Fit framework. It feels sort of weird to read an article in a major publication that mirrors a conversation you had over beer just a few nights before.

Thu, 06 Feb 2003 19:43:15 GMT

Shipping the prototype by Jon Udell at InfoWorld says "Let's promote scripting languages to the status they deserve"

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 23:23:06 GMT

What Python Can Do for the Enterprise on the NewsFactor Network

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 18:16:45 GMT

PyObjC is interesting, but not relevant to me

I don't expect I'll be using PyObjC much myself because I'm committed to writing cross-platform applications. That is why I'm using Python, wxPython and PythonCard to write apps that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I don't know Objective-C and I really don't have any interest in learning a single OS API such as Cocoa anymore than I want to invest a lot of time in .NET that only works with Windows.

Yes, .NET may someday run on the Mac, but I'll bet it won't ever work on Linux. I think the Mono project is deluding itself if it thinks that someday it won't get crushed by the MS lawyers, so that isn't an option for .NET compatibility. I'll be very pleased if Mono does succeed, but I won't consider investing time even looking at C# and .NET for a couple of years. I'm very happy with Python and libs for Python.

I've changed my primary operating system many times in the past and I expect that I will again, so cross-platform, open source languages and libraries are the thing for me. In fact, all of the PythonCard code that I've written in the last year and half is now working on my G4 tower.

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 18:08:16 GMT

PyObjC

Introduction to PyObjC is now available. This is the first article in a series on PyObjC by my friend Bill Bumgarner. For doing Mac OS X specific applications, PyObjC looks like a great solution because you have direct access to Cocoa and can use Project Builder and Interface Builder as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Mon, 27 Jan 2003 20:35:07 GMT

A Conversion with Guido van Rossum

This set of interviews done with Guido back in July are just now being published. The first five are already available, and there will be one more installment next week. They are quite interesting, especially the third one which explores Python programmer productivity compared to other languages.

In Part I: The Making of Python, van Rossum describes Python's history, major influences, and design goals.
In Part II: Python's Design Goals, van Rossum talks about Python's original design goals—how he originally intended Python to "bridge the gap between the shell and C," and how it eventually became used on large-scale applications.
In Part III: Programming at Python Speed, van Rossum discusses the source of Python's famed programmer productivity and the joys of exploring new territory with code.
In Part IV: Contracts in Python, van Rossum discusses the nature of contracts in a runtime typed programming language such as Python.
In Part V: Strong versus Weak Typing, van Rossum discusses the robustness of systems built with strongly and weakly typed languages, the value of testing, and whether he'd fly on an all-Python plane.

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 17:22:53 GMT

PythonCard 0.7

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The latest release of PythonCard includes over 40 sample applications and tools to help users edit and build applications in Python. Check out the sample pages for screenshots and info about the samples.

The documentation page has links to installation instructions for Windows that covers installing Python, wxPython, and PythonCard. Check the changelog for a complete list of changes for release 0.7.

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 20:10:20 GMT

Python Success Stories [via Python owns us]

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 18:11:58 GMT

Outlook and Python

I've posted a new Python Cookbook recipe titled import Outlook contacts using win32com. It provides a simple class and test code to read the Contacts from Outlook using win32com.

Many thanks to Mark Hammond for explaining various optimization issues.

Wed, 25 Dec 2002 18:55:51 GMT

Add .py and .pyw to PATHEXT on Windows

Happy holidays everyone!

While reading the following cookbook entry I realized many people probably don't know there is an easier way to invoke Python scripts just like batch files and other executables on your PATH under Windows. I went ahead and added a comment to the cookbook and I've included the description below and some additional details.

There is a much simpler way than wrapping a Python script in a batch file. Simply add .py and .pyw to the PATHEXT environment variable on Windows NT, 2000, and XP (possibly Win9x and ME too, but I can't test that).

Open the System Control Panel, select the Advanced tab and then click the Environment Variables... button to bring up the dialog. PATHEXT is listed under the System variables. Once you've made the change, if you type set and press return in the command shell you should see your change:

PATHEXT=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.PY;.PYW

Now if you have a program called hello.py in one of the directories on your PATH, you can invoke it by just typing hello and return. Here's a simple hello.py test script showing that you do get command-line args as well.

import sys
print "hello", sys.argv

I ran it at the command prompt (note that I stuck hello.py in my c:\posix directory which was already on my PATH).

C:\>hello world
hello ['C:\\posix\\hello.py', 'world']

Of course one of the nice things about using Python scripts instead of batch files or scripts written in VBScript and JavaScript is that the scripts are portable to Unix and other operating systems as long as you don't use any Windows-specific extensions such as COM; the Python standard libs provide a lot of functions and methods to hide platform differences such as path separators.

If you do need to access COM or manipulate the registry in your scripts, you'll want to install Mark Hammond's win32all extension. Among other things, I use win32all to manipulate the Outlook object model with Python instead of having to use VBA or VBScript.

Associating file extensions with scripts

Note that you still won't be able to select a .py or .pyw file in the Explorer to open files of a particular extension. In order to do that, you'll need to use a variation of the instructions for associating .py and .pyw files with the codeEditor found on the codeEditor wiki page:

Just substitute your program for the codeEditor, and the extensions such as .txt, or .jpg, etc. you want to open. I use this trick so that the PythonCard pictureViewer sample can open image files on my machine and the textEditor and codeEditor tools can open text files including HTML and XML; the codeEditor is particularly good for very large HTML and XML files which can cause HomeSite and other HTML editors to slowdown.

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 00:01:23 GMT

case-insensitive sort of list of strings

I added a new recipe to the Python Cookbook.

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/170242

There are some additional comments about the recipe on the PythonCard-users mailing list.

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 20:36:39 GMT

Python Persistance Management

Patrick K. O'Brien writes about "using serialization to store Python objects" in this IBM developerWorks article.

Persistence is all about keeping objects around, even between executions of a program. In this article you'll get a general understanding of various persistence mechanisms for Python objects, from relational databases to Python pickles and beyond. You'll also take an in-depth look at Python's object serialization capabilities.

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 16:08:19 GMT

PythonCard 0.6.9

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The latest release of PythonCard includes over 30 sample applications and four tools to help users edit and build applications in Python.

The documentation page has links to installation instructions for Windows that covers installing Python, wxPython, and PythonCard. Check the changelog for a complete list of changes for release 0.6.9.

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 19:36:02 GMT

Jon Udell has posted an article about Python as the "scripting language [to] drive a major, user-facing, GUI-intensive application". I have often wondered myself why Mahogany wasn't done in Python and wxPython instead of C++ and wxWindows.

We're exploring the scriptability of apps with PythonCard. Both the codeEditor and textEditor expose the Python shell, which is built-in to all PythonCard applications. However, rather than just having a menu item to hide and show the shell, we added the ability to run scripts, or Scriptlets as I like to call them which are analogous to the VBA scripts people can run in Microsoft Office.

The entire object model of a PythonCard application is exposed, so if an app doesn't have the feature you want, you can probably extend it with a short "macro" in Python. All scripts are run in the shell, so they share the shell namespace and thus scripts can share variables since the namespace doesn't go away until the application is closed. I posted an example of a scriptlet with the codeEditor back in May.

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 01:22:04 GMT

Open Source Agenda?

Mitch Kapor has finally posted some info about what his new company is working on, a Personal Information Manager. [Thanks to Dave Winer for posting about this, I didn't even know Mitch had a blog!]

The reason for posting the info here is that it involves Python and wxWindows/wxPython, though there isn't much about that in the blog post. I first found out about this project in late July at OSCON 2002 in San Diego. I found Mitch's reasons for using open source and Python/wxPython for a commercial software project to be quite compelling.

It has more info on the origins of the Open Source Applications Foundation. The technology pages highlight some of the things they are using and the architecture page shows how it is all supposed to fit together. If you want to contribute ideas or follow the progress of the applications, you can join the mailing list.

Fri, 19 Jul 2002 00:09:58 GMT

Building GUI Applications with PythonCard and PyCrust by Patrick K. O'Brien

Patrick put together this article for O'Reilly to give people a taste of what we'll be covering during our OSCON presentation on Thursday, July 25th.