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Note that Python 2.0 included a cycle-detection algorithm, so reference cycles do get cleaned up now. See the Modules/gcmodule.c file in the Python source distribution, and the GC module docs.

damn, these things rock. where'd you get em man?

http://www.python.org/~guido/images/Guido@200dpi.j pg

E.

-

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

With Computer Programming For Everbody on the back burner, what is your sense of the current state of Python in education?

With Computer Programming For Everbody on the back burner, what is your sense of the current state of Python in education?

Hmm, looks an awful lot like that felicitous union of Python and Perl I've been hearing so much about... what was that called again?

You cant even get a half-decent JVM for the thing.

you say that like it's a bad thing. free your mind and the code will follow.

I agree on your analysis of The Matrix's themes & predictability. However, I found it fabulous from the point of view of implementation and how Morphius et al. cracked it mobile telephones, jacking in, encoded simulation, etc. (though, for some of it, you couldn't look too closely). I also liked it visually, including effects (martial arts, bullet time, rain-of-.50-shells). I saw it a second time months later (in the theater) & it held up.

The real question for me is what will happen in the sequel especially now that Neo is (essentially) a matrix god. In the science fiction (and action) genre I can only think of Terminator II that successfull expanded on the themes of the original, while simultaneously going over the top on action & effects.

import standard.disclaimer

Python ( http://python.org/ )
+ Qt ( http://www.thekompany.com/projects/pykde/ )
+ Firebird ( http://firebird.sourceforge.net/ )
+ gvib ( http://www.zope.org/Members/RETierney/gvibDA )
=
A delicious cross-platform substitute for my obese friend Swing.

---

Why not go read Guido's tutorial (which IMHO is very nicely written and easy to read) and find out for yourself. If you know a few other languages, you can learn Python in a couple of hours.

Perl Is Bigger, But Python Is Growing Faster.

Python Is More Deeply Object-Oriented.

Perl Is more Powerful And More Mature In Some Ways.

Perl Lacks A Killer App, Zope Is Python's Killer App.

Python Is Designed To Be A Good First Language For A Beginning Programmer, Whereas Perl Is Most Useful To Programmers Familiar With C, Sed Or Awk, And UNIX Command Idioms.

His complete write up is here. (warning the article is a bit long... 4 pages)

And finally Python Humor

Python, I believe, is as portable as Java. Check out the list of supported platforms. Lately, a port have been made for PalmOs, so the handheld advantage of Java has just diminished. The Python scripts can run on all kinds of machines with only minor modifications.

Don't laugh -- Interstelen is a similar game to what's being discussed here (though not as massively multiplayer presumably), and has an Esperanto name. (It's being written in Python, though.)

The Python software Foundation was announced on Tuesday, but I guess that isn't important enough for a story.

We will continue to use C++, Java, Perl, and a number of other languages, but Python certainly will have its place.

That's not such a big deal I agree. It only means that for a certain kind of activity they use what they think is the best language. Having Python among these is a small step for Disney, but a big step for the Python community, a good way to be legitimated in any case. Disney has been for some time in the open source business (can I put these words together ?) like with go.com search engine and their Tea language so I'm not surprised that they get into Python now. One potential very good aspect of this proof of interest though is there is now a real chance that some Disney graphists will be kind enough to propose new flashy ideas to replace their crappy logo.

Sure! http://www.python.org/download

We use XML-RPC on our Python-powered intranet to grab headlines from O'Reilly's free Meerkat wire service via Secret Lab's free xmlrpclib module. Dave Warner wrote an excellent article on XML-RPC and Python here, using Meerkat as an example of a real XML-RPC server.

If Python is not your thing, there are XML-RPC libraries for PHP and Perl. Rael Dornfest wrote an excellent article on Meerkat's XML-RPC interface here, with sample PHP and Perl code (as well as Python).

-M

You're smart; why haven't you learned Python yet? diveintopython.org

Thank you for your time :)

Vam (stepping of the soap box)

qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = elts_lt_x ++ [x] ++ elts_greq_x
where
elts_lt_x = [y | y <- xs, y < x]
elts_greq_x = [y | y <- xs, y >= x]

If I were the president of a gaming firm (instead I'm the president of a free software producing company), I would seperate the code from the content and cut some costs.

Game development costs are ridiculous for the returns of mediocre selling games. Either you make a smash game or you sink. Costs could be cut a heck of a lot if there was more code re-use in today's gaming industry. It seems every little game has its proprietary 3D rendering engine. That's great, but why not focus your efforts where it counts (the fun of the game!).

If there was a free, cross-platform, very fast (as in cpu cycles) rapid game development platform that emphasised modularity, anyone could build games on their spare time using world-class tools developed by thousands of enthusiasts all over the world! All that would be needed is a game production company to want to cut development costs by not wanting to pay for a rewrite of mountains of code.

If the game development environment was to be composed of many interworking (but independant) parts, the useless parts could be discarded when not needed (stopping game developer's fear of bloat :)

Making the environment easy to use would encourage new developers who are only interested in making games (instead of computer programming) to make more games! It would also increase pressure on game production co's to make better games!(nice graphics are a novelty, crappy storylines make for crappy gameplay and no fun)

This only leads to increased prosperity and everything your heart desires. Thank you.

• Python as a scripting language
• Crystal Clear project
• Crystal Space

Actually that's from the python documentation, here is the link

What we need is a language that promotes concise but readable code.

I believe that was one of the goals of Python. If nothing else, it forces you to indent your code properly.

--

at the time, we looked at the ideas, found them confusing and foreign, we asked why. the explanation -- and a good one -- was that a strong problem-solving background will always be useful. had they taught us the 1996 idea du jour, we would have skills that were no longer useful.

so in that vein, spend a good chunk (but not all) of your time giving him or her a basis for learning.

that said, i'm a big believer in learning by doing (works for me). have the kid build a web site (i.e. backend), learn OOP (I like Python), work on some ACM contest problems and stuff.

have the kid learn other stuff, too. maybe they're the next john lennon or william gibson (i.e. music, writing, design) or whatever.

Paul

It claims (without proof) to be a lot faster than Java: 1.5 - 3 times slower than C (according to this document, the source of much of the following information).

It's all tooled up with both the bad bways of Garbage Collection. Yes, let's hear it, folks, for Mark and Sweep and his old sparring partner Reference Counting. Still doesn't stop it churning perceptibly in the ticker applet. (They claim RT scheduling but that's no good when you're sitting inside IE with JavaScript turned on in a force 9 pr0n gale.) The polyhedra demo is fast and smoothe and reasonably svelte.

'array of array of vector of arse'. Gak! Neither I nor the compiler are amused that dcl is now compulsory.

It can run Limbo source or binaries, not just bytecode.

Dennis Ritchie encourages the development of a C compiler, and maybe the one bundled with Plan 9 has a few tricks up its sleeve. With a gcj-style Dis backend you could install signed X and Gnome/GTK/KDE/Qt (or the unbelievably cool Ion Window Manager) applets to replace the embarrassingly retro interface. How about writing DHTML in Perl or Python instead of JavaScript? Can you say .GNET?

The site's 3 years old and the guy may be talking out of his arse. I'll give him this, though: he sure knows how to diss up C++ with a zeal for hellfire and damnation truly worthy of his dear OS's name:

C++ objects and their complexities are happily left out. There is no polymorphism or tricky exception handling (the difficulty of understanding exception handling caused the explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket).

It's not every day you download and install an operating system in a couple of seconds (ADSL). Didn't even have to powercycle IE let alone reboot its other OS plugin, Windows. If they don't open the source I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's looking at his/her 1 floppy Linux distro and hatching a cunning plan. What a shame Theo de Raadt's so down on a pocket OpenBSD (reminds me of Guido's antipathy to a Python shared object, Linus's allergy to a kernel debugger). That fireproof sonofabitch would be a perfect fit for plug-in World Domination.

You can mount your ram disk noexec-- this precludes executables from being run from them. It doesn't stop scripts from being run, though, but presumably in a small enough system you will avoid having Pearl.

People are working on a Python equivalent; give us (me, mostly) a few months...

Not surprising, since Perl is going the way of VB and becoming a bloated, hard-to-read language best suited for writing completely unmaintainable, uncomprehensible code.

Most people are moving to Python or Ruby, which are proving to be far more readable, extensible, and flexible languages than Perl.

Don't get me wrong--I used to be a Perl zealot, until the amount of crap that Perl adopted just sickened me to the point where I had to leave my first love and find something else that would be much more suitable to what Perl used to be perfect for... *sigh*

My son discovered the DOS command prompt a while back, and taught himself to write .bat files, which are great for playing tricks on mom or customizing logout messages for the grandparents. That was a great intro to the whole directory structure behind Windows, and it was not long from there to Partition Magic and his first Linux distro. This amazing young man reads all the Linux mags we can find, and is now talking about building a Linux screamer for cheap. Age = 11.

Python is great. I found it while looking for a modern day version of Logo, introduced him to it, and away he went. (Yes, I know Logo still exists in more modern form, but the educational system support for it is no longer there, nor is it easy or cheap to find.)

Since NO ONE in his school was providing any help, we reached out to our local PC Users Group as well as to the SLUG on the local University campus. Both groups have been terrific, but the SLUG guys (almost all are guys) have gone above and beyond. Check out any local installfest and I am sure you will find the same kind of enthusiasm when they recognize a junior "one of their own" in your proto-programmer.

By the way, I picked up a copy of Compton Learning's Programming Made Easy, which purports to teach something called "Truck", Basic, C, and Java. Don't waste a penny on it. Beyond Truck, it is mostly multiple choice questions about what various bits of the language would look like. It does a bit of introduction to basic concepts, and not much beyond. It will turn off most kids in about five minutes. (It is aimed at ages 16 and up. I am "up", and it is sure not aimed at me.)

I have an idea. Let's start a revolution. Have each LUG adopt a local school. Have people gather up basement doorstoppers (say, old 486s), sponsor an installfest (have a ready source of old spare parts, and teach anyone interested (students, parents, teachers) how to get started in Linux. (A network card and connection will get around the old peripherals problem. Or use one of the tiny Linux distributions.) And/or do the same thing for Python. Agree to provide support. Meet one night a month in the school pc lab. There are bound to be a handful of kids who would be interested, in any school, and some of their parents. This could be done for little more than the investment of time. Let the wild rumpus begin!

It's too hard to program computers these days. If I wanted to teach someone to program ten years ago, a machine like a BBC Micro would be great: you turn it on, it's immediately ready to accept a program, and drawing to the screen is relatively easy. If you want to draw anything now (essential for the gratification factor in learning to program) you have to become expert on events and windowing systems.

I'd like someone to put together a nice enviroment for beginning programmers. Base it on Python and gtk, so it's portable between Windows and Unix. Use Glade so people can start off drawing what they want their program to look like, then write bits of Python to make it work. Throw in a really good canvas widget, so it's easy to start drawing things and get things moving on the screen without worrying about expose events and redraws. Then write the book "Learn to program with Python", that takes beginners who've only ever used computers before by the hand and leads them through the delights of making them do your bidding.

I know that the CP4E project is looking to shape Python into the ideal beginners language. I'd love to see this happen, because Python is a beginners language you can stick with to write real, large scale applications that do real work.
--

Well, there's Guido...

--

Maybe the complainers have to work with shitty programmers. It does you a lot of good to write good code if everyone you work with writes crap. Some languages make it easer to write crap than others.

Everything he said was correct. The guy that was claiming that "perl is for crackheads" etc etc didn't have a keen grasp of logic.

The announcement can also be found here:
http://www.python.org/digicool.html ; ;
--

If you don't know what Python is, you probably wouldn't want him there . . . or if your LUG is fairly large than a number of people might find him uninteresting. But as the inventer of an open-source language, I'd say he's fairly well qualified to speak.

I'm not quite sure how available he is . . you'll have to pardon my lack of information. My high school was one of the first ones in the country to teach Python as a first year programming course. That was last year . . . and my teacher somehow managed to get Guido there. I don't know whether he was already in town and was interested in seeing how the class was working out or whether he speaks regularly.

At any rate, he was interesting and knowledgeabout about open-source and programming languages in general. He was also very genial and fielded questions from the class after the presentation, answering them with intelligence and accuracy.

(To quote myself)
You can in fact write (and compile) code for JVM in Eiffel, Fortran, LISP, Visual Basic, Ada 95, Python, PERL, C, any language that GCC supports, and a whole slew of other languages (170 or so).

See the comments to cid 135 and this page.

BS! You can in fact write (and compile) code for JVM in Eiffel, Fortran, LISP, Visual Basic, Ada 95, Python, PERL, C, any language that GCC supports, and a whole slew of other languages.

In the future, keep your uninformed ramblings to yourself.

See the comments to cid#135this page.

As computers got faster, the difference in execution time diminished to the point where everybody takes it for granted that they should write in a high level language.

Go read comp.lang.asm.x86 for a while. Not everyone takes it for granted that they should write in a high level language. That said, I agree with you. I think those "I'm going to write an MS Word clone in 100% x86 assembly" guys are kooks. As far as I'm concerned, assembly is only for the inner loop of a realtime system, certain device drivers and certain bits of platform-specific OS code.

At the same time, I think there are a few features about Java that make it less efficient than it needs to be. The whole "all object are on the heap" thing is really difficult for the JVM to optimize away, and impossible in most cases. The lack of generics plus the fact that the basic types aren't Objects makes containers exceedingly inefficient for things like integers, doubles, etc. The whole "magical Array class" nonsense is just a blatant hack to get around this a bit.

Despite that, I still think comes out ahead of C and C++ in most of the situations I have to deal with. If I didn't care about execution speed at all, I'd probably use Python for everything. (Python is pretty quick for some things. It really depends upon what you're doing, as with all things.)

He's right. Learning some things will definitely help the way you think about things. The incredibly strong typing of something like pascal will definitely kick your *ss if you've been doing nothing but C for a while, and I think that's actually a Good Thing. Learning Eiffel if you already know smalltalk is a very different experience.

Even something like Algol will probably change your views and get you closer to the hardware in many respects (not that you can get Algol to run on most machines anymore....;-)

What about Ada? Programming by Contract really will teach you something serious about how you actually interact with the rest of your application, and while you'll curse it ("I KNOW what I'm trying to do and it's correct, dammit!") you'll be happier for learning it. Older, but happier.

And as long as the languages keep coming, there'll pretty much never be a chance to really run out.

My list would include:

• C
• C++
• Pascal& lt;/a>
• Lisp (anything but eLisp)
• Python
• Perl
• Smalltalk
• ML
• prolog&l t;/a>
• Eiffel
• Ada
• a RISC Assembler
• Cobol (those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it)
• Java
• BASIC (the non-Visual kind).

By far the biggest problem the OSS community has is poor communication with users and potential users.

Marketing is creating a connection between an effort and potential users. Most OSS leaders don't think about marketing, or don't think about it sufficiently.

OSS project web site home pages often don't even have a few clear paragraphs about the purpose of the software! This is true even of large, excellent efforts like the PHP Hypertext Processor and the Python Programming Language.

Poor communication creates a high barrier for potential users and for potential developers. Better communication is the single most important area of improvement that could increase the spread of Open Source Software.

If you have an open source software project and need help with communication, email me. This seems to be the way that I can best contribute.

Michael

I think it's a neverending debate because the good question is not "Which one is better as a first language?" The question you should ask yourself is "Which one is better for me?"

I found Python to be better suited for me, and of course I'm trying to convert everyone to Python. But I know there are (lots of) people who prefer Perl.

So, here is my unofficial "Choose between Perl and Pyhton in 2 days" guide:
Day 1
Download and install
Python at http://www.python.org/download/ http://www.perl.com/pub/lang uag e/info/software.html

Download/Browse/Print (whatever suits you) some tutorials
Python at http://www.python.org/doc/current /tu t/tut.html
Perl at http://ww w.c clabs.missouri.edu/things/instruction/perl/perlcou rse.html

Rest of the 2 days:
Follow the tutorials and try to write some very short programs of your own.

Third day:
Go back to work with sore, red eyes.

Later: Learn them both, and C too!

I think it's a neverending debate because the good question is not "Which one is better as a first language?" The question you should ask yourself is "Which one is better for me?"

I found Python to be better suited for me, and of course I'm trying to convert everyone to Python. But I know there are (lots of) people who prefer Perl.

So, here is my unofficial "Choose between Perl and Pyhton in 2 days" guide:
Day 1
Download and install
Python at http://www.python.org/download/ http://www.perl.com/pub/lang uag e/info/software.html

Download/Browse/Print (whatever suits you) some tutorials
Python at http://www.python.org/doc/current /tu t/tut.html
Perl at http://ww w.c clabs.missouri.edu/things/instruction/perl/perlcou rse.html

Rest of the 2 days:
Follow the tutorials and try to write some very short programs of your own.

Third day:
Go back to work with sore, red eyes.

Later: Learn them both, and C too!

Which editor has good support for editing Python source code?

On Unix, the first choice is Emacs/XEmacs. There's an elaborate mode for editing Python code, which is available from the Python source distribution (Misc/python-mode.el). It's also bundled with XEmacs (we're still working on legal details to make it possible to bundle it with FSF Emacs). And it has its own web page:

http://www.python.org/emacs/python-mode/index.html There are many other choices, for Unix, Windows or Macintosh. Richard Jones compiled a table from postings on the Python newsgroup:

http://www.bofh.asn.au/~richard/editors.html See also FAQ question 7.10 for some more Mac and Win options.

Hope this helps. Like I said above I'm just beginning to learn python so my knowledge is somewhat limited. I just like what I've seen so far.

Metamoderation has it's own criteria about who gets to do it, much like moderation. I think they throw out the last 25% of newly created accounts and also take karma into consideration.

Normally it appears about once every 24 hours on the main page. If you've never seen it that may be due to a bug in the old slashcode which kept certain people from ever seeing it, you had to discover and go there yourself. The bug also prevented people from being able to meta if they hadn't before a certain point (when they changed to the bug-code? THis is pretty much all fixed now from all reports.) However if you have positive karma and visit metamod.pl, you should be able to metamoderate now. It resets at 7 pm EST so if you just did it, you'll see it come up at the top of your page sometime between then and 8(depending on when apache delivers you the updated content.)

But the short answer to your question, is that you should see it at the top of your page whenever you are deemed worthy by the little pearl scripts that run this site. If it still doesn't come up I'd email Rob and or Cowboyneal and ask them about it, as I'm able to , so by your usernumber so should you be.

One word of warning, the present system allows you to make changes to the moderators karma for bad moderation, but there is an unusual check in place. If you disagree too often on moderations it will cause you to lose karma. For this reason I reccomend not disagreeing too often no matter what the comments say if your karma concerns you. Two or three bad moderations are about the most you'll be able to deal with per session, so go with ones that irk you the most, and leave any other bad moderations unchecked so the next meta-guy will get them, but for Gad's sake don't approve anything you aren't comfortable with! For other questions about metamoderation try the the semiofficial sid.

Fist Prost

"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."

Perl has it's place but it's a monster. It's syntactic contextual hell.

I agree I don't know if we need another language. I don't think I ever code in anything called basic though. Stupid excuse but it's just so old fashined. I remember some guy showing my 6th grade class the real old basic on the apple II! (now let's see if you can guess my age :~)

I just read through the entire Python Tutorial in about 12 hours between yesterday and today. I would say I'm pretty impressed. I heard it was cool but coming from the Java world Python is SWEET! And this was after fooling around with perl for a few hours and getting nowhere. I suck at perl :~( I have not gotten to the point where I can objectively say it is will live up to first impression but I just parsed my mail spool using the build in mailbox module and created a dbm in no time flat. So far so good. PS Run the interpreter in a small window while you read. And _really_ read it. It's just not that long. You'll be kickn' perls ass in no time.

KidSock

Basic has a number of bad feature and I think we should let the pile of cruft died with windows.

Why invent a new BASIC when we already have a better basic: Python ?

Thanks for the comments on Python! I'm sitting here, Python book by my side, currently trying to learn it. Was getting disheartened but reading posts like yours fill me with confidence again.

Glad to hear it!

I personally learnt Python from Programming Python, from ORA, which is a fairly good book, but I soon learnt that the Online Documentation was invaluable. Especially the Library Reference.

For those who are interested, I have a small python cgi here . Just to pretend this is on-topic... "I'd hate to write even that in VB". :)

-Spiv.

You're wrong about that - a trained GUI monkey can automate anything (s)he wants to in Python.

7.Is it compatible with the GNU Public License (GPL)?

Legal counsel for both CNRI and BeOpen.com believe that it is fully compatible with the GPL. However, the Free Software Foundation attorney and Richard Stallman believe there may be one incompatibility, i.e., the CNRI License specifies a legal venue to interpret its License while the GPL is silent on the issue of jurisdiction. Resolution of this issue is being pursued.