SimpleTAL - standalone TAL and METAL implementation

Digital Lumber, Inc. - A complete nameserver in Python

Patents Should Meet BASIC Tests of Reason

Ouch. A couple of employees from the Microsoft Visual Basic Team apparently filed a patent on the IsNot operator - yes, something like a "not equal to", but for object references instead of values - what a bunch of nonsense. And cheekily, they also claim in their application that Borland Delphi is a Basic derivative — while ignoring the fact that Delphi is Pascal, which has a quite different history...

The whole thing has the feel of a joke, but unfortunately it appears to be true.

Here's the original article.

pyeBay - Use the eBay API from Python - Python API für eBay

Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions - Partly witty, partly serious answers to not entirely obvious questions about Python

Slate Language Website

More interesting is actually Slate. On the one hand, the implementation is freely available to play around with, and on the other hand, the language at least came into the world with a concept - Smalltalk with multimethod dispatch à la CLOS and a prototype-based object system à la Self. All of it, though, in classic Smalltalk syntax. That's at least a vision - let's do what Common Lisp has been able to do for a long time, but in Smalltalk.

But then I still ask myself why not just use Common Lisp, where you'd simply have to build the prototype-based object system as a package, but macros, multimethod dispatch and other fun stuff are already done? Programming language designers are masochists

Here's the original article.

The Curl Project

And since we're on a roll beating up on stupid programming languages: MIT wasn't really any better either. They replaced the round brackets with curly ones. Great. Not much better than angle brackets, and the commercial exploitation of this grandiose idea was promptly taken over by a company.

But since this is MIT, of course they went two steps further and wanted to basically understand it as a new markup system. So to speak, as an alternative to HTML.

And because you can only make waves at MIT if you're truly crazy, the whole thing ended up being not just an object-oriented Scheme where you replaced the round brackets with curly brackets - no, they also threw in a box model from TeX for layouting.

Hurrah. We needed that. Not.

Here's the original article.

Water -- Waterlanguage.org

Translation

Yet another programming language that nobody really needs. In principle, it's based on a Lisp that works with XML syntax instead of S-expressions (those wild bracket expressions that Lispers love so much and everyone else hates). Angle brackets instead of parentheses - what a tremendous improvement.

And to top it all off, it's also a proprietary project. And written in Java. Wow, Java must be really sick if it's coming up with such sick solutions.

The same thing can be done better and more elegantly with various free Lisp projects - and you can stick with the round brackets too.

Here's the original article.

Welcome to read4me project page - RSS Reader in Python with Bayesian Filter

wxPython and wxGlade Tutorial - Tutorial on wxPython and wxGlade

2Entwine | FotoBuzz Viewlet - Javascript+Flash for presenting images with in-image commenting

ONLamp.com: Introducing Slony - Slony is an asynchronous replication solution for PostgreSQL

What's New in Python 2.4

Who wants to know what comes with Python 2.4, Andrew Kuchling has as usual produced a good overview. A few things are really interesting - I particularly like the generator expressions. But then again, I'm an old Lisperer.

Also nice is the Decimal data type - it will solve some problems at the company much more elegantly than they are approached today. And higher performance is certainly good too.

Here's the original article.

Web Services

When you read through all of this, at least you know again why you'd rather do XML-RPC. Yes, it doesn't have a really clean formal definition and the original leading implementation from Userland is buggy as hell. But at least there aren't a bunch of academics without real-world experience hanging around in the XML-RPC community who then think they have to indulge themselves in obscure and twisted standards documents...

At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

Frontier Scripting - All kinds of Frontier sources - lots of scripts and suites

Frontier Tutorials - A few more Frontier Tutorials

Serious First Steps In UserTalk Scripting - More up-to-date version of a Frontier Usertalk Tutorial

Table of Contents for Matt's Frontier Book - Online version of the Frontier book

Up and Running with Frontier Web Site Management - More updated version of a Frontier website tutorial

Mikel Evins: RAD Skater

Cool! One of the old SK8 developers — essentially the best rapid prototyping system from Apple, kind of HyperCard on steroids, dope, amphetamine and dextrose — and a few other programmers from the scene want to build an open source RAD tool that should build on SK8's ideas — and will therefore be called Skate.

As far as I'm concerned, they could be done with it already.

At Planet Lisp you'll find the original article.

Revision 7229: /user/arigo/greenlet - Coroutines for standard Python

dirtSimple.org: Using 2.4 decorators with 2.2 and 2.3 - How to use Python decorators with 2.2 and 2.3 - even though with slightly different syntax

Generic Functions have Landed

Generic functions with multiparameter dispatch in Python

Shibazuke Serialization - Object serialization for Python that only supports basic data types

ASPN : Python Cookbook : Language detection using character trigrams - Interesting approach to language detection using trigrams

Confidential! - Confidential?

Funny what you can find on Google. I looked to see if someone had already ported Frontier to Linux. In doing so, I stumbled across the linked page where it apparently was already discussed at some point — making Frontier open source back in 2001, probably under the Apache License. The pages have something on them that says "Confidential" — with a fake red stamp. No idea if that's an internal discussion site of Userland.

There's also a download area with old source code — it still contains an NDA for access to the sources.

Google finds everything.

Here's the original article.

Frontier Kernel - Sourceforge project for the Open Source Frontier Kernel

PyLog -- A first order logic library in Python - Prolog in Python

Zope.org - ZopeX3-3.0.0

Well, here it is, the new Zope with the new architecture. Everything new comes in November, or so. Looks quite amusing, but somehow it's also quite different from what Zope was before. However, I'm not yet sure whether I should like it or dislike it

Here you can find the original article.

Factor programming language

Once again something from the corner of obscure programming languages. And this time it's a Forth descendant again, but one that borrows more heavily from Lisp and functional concepts and also orients itself more toward Lisp in its system architecture. Looks quite interesting and of course speaks directly to an old Forther and Lisper like me. The author also has a weblog where he occasionally writes about his language and its implementation - currently, for example, about type inference in Factor. Here's the original article.

Python Object Sharing (POSH) - Pack Python Objects in Shared Memory

Python Memory Management

A few interesting pieces of information about how Python manages memory and why Python processes sometimes don't want to give back memory.

Here you can find the original article.

Experiences with pycrypto

I recently posted a link to pycrypto in the blogmarks - I've now used it in the Toolserver Framework for Python to add encrypted RPCs and RSA authentication. I have to say, I'm really enthusiastic about this library - you can achieve results very simply and quickly, the interfaces of the various algorithms are very sensibly designed, and it's a good collection of algorithms - including often neglected areas like proper random number generation (including access to operating system mechanisms for this purpose, on Linux, OS X, and even Windows!). So if you're planning a project with Python and cryptography, definitely check out this library. It's so simple to use that it's even suitable as a standard library for small use cases - for example, for encrypting passwords or similar purposes. Somehow remarkable, I'm now using the second project maintained by Andrew Kuchling: in the Toolserver Framework for Python, the Medusa server is included as the web server - a fast and compact web server written in Python with many interesting extension options. The original article is here.

Dowser - Meta search engine for the desktop in Python

M2Crypto Installer for Python 2.3 - Installer for M2Crypto - an open source Python crypto & SSL toolkit. - python, cryptography, SSL, S/MIME, ZServerSSL, ZSmime, PKI, Zope - And the grandfather of all crypto toolkits for Python

Python Cryptography Toolkit - Yet another cryptography toolkit for Python - more algorithms, fewer protocols

TLS Lite - Public key algorithms and other encryption stuff - in pure Python (OpenSSL support optional)

Airspeed - Trac - Compact template engine with Cheetah-like syntax

ECL v0.9d released

ECL is a pretty nice Common Lisp - relatively fast and with the C compiler you can really get solid code. And the best part: it can be embedded in other programs. Common Lisp might be a bit overkill for a scripting language, but better to go big than small.

At Rainer Joswig's Lisp News you can find the original article.

Planet Planet! - Web-based aggregator in Python

Python ipqueue

Anyone who has always wanted to tinker with the TCP/IP stack in Linux, but doesn't like C and prefers to use Python instead: the linked project offers an elegant solution for that. It allows you to hook Python scripts into Linux's Netfilter. Transparent proxies and similar things can be accomplished with just a few lines of code.

Here you can find the original article.

Linux: In Kernel GUI

Very interesting for control systems and perhaps also PDAs: a GUI system that runs completely in the Linux Kernel and is integrated into it, requiring extremely few resources.

Here's the original article.

#python discussion of how to implement the Halting Problem

Ouch. Such discussions hurt. Even when you only read them and don't have to take part.

Here you can find the original article.

OkayRpcProtocol - YAML Implementors Site - RPC mechanism for YAML - interesting for TooFPy?

PyYaml - Trac - YAML parser for Python

SLiP << Projects << very simple website for Scott Sweeney - Shorthand notation for XML - inspired by Python

( Syck ): YAML for Ruby, Python, PHP and OCaml - Yet another YAML parser and emitter - this one focuses on completeness, speed and cross-platform support

YAML Ain't Markup Language - YAML language description

SLIME: The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs - Embed Common Lisp systems in Emacs

Bill Clementson: Allegro CL 7.0 released

Nice what Franz built into Allegro Common Lisp. However, the exorbitant price for Allegro CL is still rather off-putting for hobbyists. Yes, I know about the free version, but it's not really usable on all platforms - because, for example, on OS X the GUI part has always been missing so far.

At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.