For those interested in what programming languages are available on the JVM - yes, there are far more than just Java. And many of them are far more interesting than Java. And many integrate very well with Java libraries. In any case, Robert Tolksdorf has started building such a list here. I have no idea if it's complete, but the selection is enough for me ...
(although of course I'm biased and would only take either a Lisp dialect or Jython anyway)
PyX - Python graphics package - Generate 2D and 3D graphics suitable for presentations in Python
William Gibson with a few excerpts from an American tract about slavery in the American South. In it, slavery is portrayed as the last harmonious multicultural society and as a particularly Christian society. And this is being read in lessons at a Christian school in the USA. On Gibson's blog I found the original article.
Looking at how the LispWorks implementation — originally actually foreign to OS X — is gaining ground on OS X (the previous version already ran cleanly under OS X, but this one has made further progress), one can clearly see how the distributor of the originally and still macOS native MCL implementation is failing in the market. You can't really put it more positively — MCL is in my opinion to be regarded as a debacle these days. At least the biggest news on their websites for 2004 is from the summer — that they got their mailing list running again. Great. MCL was once the star in the Lisp sky. At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.
Statement coverage for Python - Primitive code coverage analysis for Python
Completely crazy, the people down under ...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Just isolated cases. We have no systemic problem. Move along. There's nothing to see here.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
And Pandora's box is open.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD I found the original article.
Oh my goodness, aren't you just sooooooo sweet
At heise online news you can find the original article.
I had already written something about this earlier, but I've only been using it more intensively now. I have to say, the whole thing has developed tremendously. With a few settings in the system and in IPython, the whole system behaves almost as comfortably as a Lisp system prompt.
The integration of display system (on OS X it's recommended to set LESS to '-R' so that color information is evaluated) and editor (of course using VIM is recommended, but it also works quite well with the bbedit command line tool) allows you to work very nicely with the Python shell. On one hand, you don't have to constantly step out to quickly look at files or change a file, and on the other hand, you really get useful information with exceptions (the automatic activation of the debugger helps here).
Automatic deep-reloading too — that is, reloading a modified module while updating the contained references — helps tremendously, since you can finally edit the files directly and test them immediately without having to exit Python every time. Existing references to objects from classes that are in the modified file of course have to be rebuilt as well, since they still reference the old class.
All in all: highly recommended.
A very interesting project: building a language with a far more Lisp-like structure on top of the normal Python runtime. Compiles to the same bytecode as Python. Can be mixed with Python and also supports IPython as a shell.
With Logix, for example, the boundary between statement and expression finally falls away: in Logix everything is expressions. Lambda expressions that execute multiple commands and conditional expressions without detours through boolean expressions become possible.
There are also macros. The definition looks somewhat wild, but all the mechanisms seem to be there as they are also common in Common Lisp. So not just syntactic sugar, but real code-generating macros.
Of course everything is still alpha at the moment, but it already sounds very interesting. I'll keep watching this, it could definitely be interesting for me. Especially because I can mix it with Python.
It's logical, really. When the service gets worse (because more and more postal offices are being closed), you have to raise prices. Always so counter-cyclical.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Monogame Guinea Pigs. Strange. I haven't quite given up hope on discovering the Honest Politician. Maybe that one can be found behind some tree stump in Bolivia too.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
Hello Mr. Stiegler? Yes, the Union is annoying with their fussing about seat distribution. Yes, the Karlsruhe ruling is frustrating for you. But please think about this: these are our highest constitutional judges. When they hand down a ruling, one shouldn't respond by essentially giving the court the finger with everything one says. No, because a ruling from the Federal Constitutional Court doesn't suit you is not sufficient reason to simply change the Bundestag's rules of procedure just like that. The whole thing sounds pretty absurd. So into the appropriate category ...
At tagesschau.de - The news from ARD you can find the original article.
xmltramp: Make XML documents easily accessible. - small compact XML parser and generator library for Python - nicely integrated into the syntax
RDFLib 2.0.4 Readme - Library for working with RDF in Python
Nice Thing - an explanation of Lisp macros for beginners. In the form of a comic. Macros are called - fittingly for the topic - SPELs.
Oh man, the whole chaos with the elections in the USA is slowly taking on quite absurd proportions.
Although you're not sure what's more absurd: what is claimed to have happened, or the figure making the claims. I wouldn't be surprised if both the guy is a crackpot and the accusations are true anyway...
What a load of garbage: the alternative to health care reform - which is already stupid enough - has a billion-dollar funding gap and is being cheered by the union party congress. How stupid do you actually have to be to get accepted into the party? Is that enough to be declared incompetent upon joining the party?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
An open letter from Donald Knuth to his student Condolezza Rice. Written back in 2002, but I stumbled across it for the first time. Fundamentally I don't see how the government of my country has done anything whatsoever to address and correct the root causes of international terrorism. Quite the contrary; every action I can see seems almost designed to have the opposite effect --- as if orchestrated to maximize the finances of those who make armaments, by maximizing the number of people who now hate me personally for actions that I do not personally condone. How can I be a proud citizen of a country that unilaterally pulls out of widely accepted treaties, that refuses to accept a world court, that flouts fair trade with shameful policies regarding steel and agriculture, and that almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation?
If I were to write something along those lines, I'd immediately be accused of salon anti-Americanism...
YAML is a very interesting and compact markup language. But one that is not based on XML or SGML; rather, it is principally oriented toward the old RFC mail formats. The genius of it: the contents are much easier for humans to read than all those angle-bracket dialects. And for the computer, the whole thing is also quite simple to parse - and it's still powerful in its expressive capabilities. If you feel like processing YAML files with Python, Syck is an extremely fast library that also offers an interface for Python. In the Active Storage Framework for Python I use YAML for database backup and restore and as a native data format. Importing YAML data into the database is thus very easy - and since YAML is hierarchical data and the Active Storage Framework for Python is a hierarchical database, everything fits together wonderfully. And you don't have to be afraid of hurting yourself on all those angle brackets.
In the morning, the Union still loudly proclaimed that cohesion should be demonstrated through an even clearer endorsement of Merkel. Well, that went completely wrong.
But Merkel will certainly spin the whole thing positively again, that much is for sure ...
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Language-Independent Types for YAML - type tags for YAML sources
ASPN : Python Cookbook : Spreadsheet - a few ideas for controlled eval in Python
Proper rip-off. What else is the monopoly for anyway
At tagesschau.de - The news from ARD you can find the original article.
Hmph. On the one hand good - because not everyone can just have their domain taken away. On the other hand, though, also bad - the domain grabbers will be happy now. And anyone who's dealt with such people knows how amusing it will be to get a domain back out from someone who just registered it as a speculative object. Whether we'll have to expect similar conditions as in the USA in the near future remains to be seen. At least with .com, .net and .org addresses, one increasingly finds only generic pages from grabbers who are setting up shop there.
At heise online news there's the original article.
A weblog from someone who programs in Python, PyGame and PyObjc under OS X (with Renaissance as a GUI system). With complete example applications available for download. If you want to take a closer look at something like this, you might find one or another piece of information there.
Holla the forest fairy! That thing is pretty neat. For me it would be — lacking musical ability — more of a torture instrument, but still, with GarageBand and a properly cross-configured software synthesizer, that would definitely be a lot of fun.
At Gizmodo there's the original article.
Renaissance - GNUStep GUI description language and library also for OS X Cocoa
The Latest Absurdities from Absurdistan
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Pyco - Tiny Python Distributions - build small Windows EXEs from Python tools.
Lasso - Souk - Python module for integration of the Liberty Alliance Single Signon Protocol.
In Münster, Cinema and Schlosstheater each won a prize (20,000 and 15,000 euros). Congratulations to them! After all, these are our last bastions of independent cinemas - Cinema has existed since my school days with long cinema nights and lard sandwiches during intermission.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Interesting project: someone has written a reimplementation of the Python/C API for OCaml (of course the native-code compiler, not the bytecode interpreter). This makes it possible to do the following things:
It all sounds very exciting and could be very interesting for some applications - OCaml produces very fast code and can easily compete with C in this area. Especially for implementing the parts of code that are too slow in Python, OCaml is of course much more interesting than C because of its significantly better type safety.
I find it very nice that the landing capsule is supposed to land on my birthday.
At WDR.de there's the original article.
Pro-Linux News: Daffodil Replicator becomes free software - Replicator that is database-agnostic and supports PostgreSQL among others
Python Packages Index: pyDB2 0.996a - DB/2 API for Python - need that at work
Yes, sure, immigrants should swear an oath to the constitution. Not every German has done that - except if they're a civil servant or served in the Bundeswehr - but you can certainly demand it of immigrants. Because terrorists would never swear falsely and would be completely frightened away by it anyway and run off.
And when it comes to German language skills: we still have Bavaria in the Federal Republic, don't we?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.
A screen reader emulator for Firefox. So you can see how your own pages would come across in a screen reader.
tsearch-v2-intro - Introduction to tsearch2 - a full-text index technique for PostgreSQL
Tsearch2 - full text extension for PostgreSQL - Further documentation on tsearch2
So actually the apple is the same as the pear. The person eating it just has to come to terms with the fact that it tastes different.
At Der Schockwellenreiter I found the original article.
The first test of the R-D1 that I've come across so far. Well, 3000 dollars (or euros) is no small change and not everyone can just pick one up right away - so it can take a while before the first tests come in. The camera is still interesting. But simply incredibly expensive.
At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) you can find the original article.
If you've taken a closer look at the Toolserver, you may have already suspected that I want to do more with it. A second project that I started a few days ago will serve the same purpose. Active Storage Framework for Python is a Python framework for putting data into databases. However, not one of the usual object-relational mappers, but its own database structure that simply misuses a SQL database underneath as a data storage — I didn't want to reinvent everything. The ideas of the Active Storage Framework for Python come from Userland Frontier and Mumps — so a hierarchical namespace in which all elements are automatically persistent and in which many object types are mapped as tables (similar to Frontier). The whole thing uses pretty much every introspection feature of Python that I know. Ok, there are some programs from me that use even nastier methods, but sometimes I'm ashamed of the particular hacks there — what I've done here is considerably cleaner. Mainly getattr and friends. Though taken to excess. As a starting point for the Active Storage Framework for Python, the README is a good choice. If you want to try it out: PostgreSQL and psycopg must be installed. Otherwise you just need a database and you can get started. The Active Storage Framework for Python creates the database schema automatically. At the moment it's only available in CVS, since I'm currently — it's still 0.1.0 — tinkering wildly with it. Interfaces and data structures can still change significantly.
Anyone interested in the project Toolserver Framework for Python - a server written in Python that makes creating web services simple and convenient - can take a look at the presentation I recently gave to colleagues about it. To view the presentation, you need a reasonably current browser that supports and has JavaScript and CSS enabled. Yes, even the devil's tool works with it.
If the slides seem too vague without my commentary, you can simply print the presentation in your browser. This pulls a different CSS stylesheet and the printout includes supplementary explanations. Basically what I talked about. The presentation system used is actually quite clever - it's S5 by Eric Meyer. Practically perfect for quickly putting together presentations with notes and publishing them on the web. And I still prefer vi to PowerPoint. Here's the original article.
Can't they finally lock this guy up?
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.