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Thursday, June 6, 2002 |
Keith's Weblog (entry #2151). , a neat interview with Guido van Rossum at onlamp.com. Nothing all that new, but I found this bit interesting:
Our CTO, Jim Fulton, has introduced a very interesting innovation called a "sprint." A number of programmers, some more experienced, some less, get together for a few days for an intensive programming session, typically using pair-programming, Extreme-Programming style.
Sprint participants are both company employees and non-employees interested in participating in the development of the open source Zope codebase. At the end of the sprint, we usually have a significant new piece of working code with unit tests, the less experienced programmers have learned a lot, and we have a few new contributors to the Zope project. This process has really reinvigorated the Zope development process.
Which brings me to another lesson from open source, from my colleague Tim Peters. Tim says this is so important to him now that he'll never go back to working for a closed-source company. The lesson is that an open source development process breeds very loyal employees.
In a typical closed-source company, programmers often develop large amounts of code to which they develop personal attachment. But when projects get canceled, companies are restructured, and management changes, they often lose access to their own code, which is de-motivating. Having your source code out there in the open is a real motivator to have pride in your code and keep improving it. [Keith's Weblog]
5:32:56 PM Google It! 
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Monday, June 3, 2002 |
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Pygame is a set of PYTHON modules designed for writing games. It is written on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the python language. The package is highly portable, with games running on Windows, NT4, MacOS, OSX, BeOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, and Linux.
10:14:56 PM Google It!
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Monday, May 6, 2002 |
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Sunday, April 21, 2002 |
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Pyrex - A language for writing Python extension modules. Pyrex is a language specially designed for writing Python extension modules. It's designed to bridge the gap between the nice, high-level, easy-to-use world of Python and the messy, low-level world of C...
Pyrex deals with the basic types just as easily as SWIG, but it also lets you write code to convert between arbitrary Python data structures and arbitrary C data structures, in a simple and natural way, without knowing anything about the Python/C API. That's right -- nothing at all! Nor do you have to worry about reference counting or error checking -- it's all taken care of automatically, behind the scenes, just as it is in interpreted Python code. And when fully implemented, Pyrex will let you define new built-in Python types just as easily as you can define new classes in Python.
The way this works is that you write code in a Python-like language (Pyrex), which allows you to access C data types directly, as well as standard Python data. The Pyrex code is then compiled into C. Seems like a nice way to extend a language. Better than having to use a different language completely, as when writing extension modules in C or C++. In some sense this is reminiscent of inlining and macros. [Lambda the Ultimate]
Cool !!!
11:22:37 AM Google It!
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Sunday, April 14, 2002 |
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Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line
parsing library for Python. Using Optik, you can add intelligent,
sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very
little overhead.
This is a nice package that I think should go to the standard python library.
10:06:08 AM Google It!
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Friday, April 12, 2002 |
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Mark Pilgrim has made a nice Python module to interface with the new Google search API. Once you have created a google account and installed his google module along with his SOAP.py replacement (necessary to make SOAP work with Python 2.2) in your python path, you can integrate Google in your own Python applications. How great... My mind boggles (googles ;-) when I see all the fun we can have with that stuff.
11:32:18 PM Google It!
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Python.org has released a new version of Python. Version 2.2.1 is mainly a bug fix that supersedes 2.2. What's new?
- new bool() builtin function
- new True/False constants
9:35:37 PM Google It!
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Wednesday, April 3, 2002 |
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At the end of last month, Activestate released a new version of ActivePython. With this version, Activestate is catching up with the official Python interpreter released in late December 2001.
Python.org will soon release Python 2.2.1, now at RC2 level.
This new version includes an XML-rpc module written by Fredrik Lundh. And a lot of other cool stuff. Time for me to upgrade.
11:25:25 PM Google It!
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© Copyright 2002 Thierry Lalinne.
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