Python is science fiction, Java is literary fiction, and Ruby on Rails is store-bought steampunk goggles*. Cynthia emailed me about Cat Valente’s funny post about programming languages as literary genres this morning. Liz Henry has a write-up too. * for the record, my steampunk goggles were bought off of Etsy.
A hybrid of HERE docs and literate programming, Doctest is a standard library feature of Python that uses the interactive shell to run tests. Ian Bicking has a JavaScript version that runs in FireFox.
[ via del.icio.us ] Scott Sweeney’s SLiP has been around since 2002, but I didn’t hear of it until recently. element(attribute=value): #comment subelement:”text node” anothersub:”"” Python-style ‘here’ doc. “”" generates: <element attribute=value> <!–comment–> <subelement> text node </subelement> <anothersub> Python-style ‘here’ doc. </anothersub> </element> Like Markdown, you can use it as a BBEdit filter. Download and [...]
I’m a little bothered by all the sniping between the various scripting language camps: Lisp bashes Python, Perl bashes PHP, everyone bashes Java. But anyone can walk up, hand $10 to a hosting company, and start serving PHP + MySQL applications. If you want to run Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else, you need to [...]
Went with a friend to Verizon, where she got a VX 4400 handset. “Oooh, this one does ringtones,” I exclaim. C laughs and says she’ll have to get a Kare Kano ringtone for it. Hah! It’s a challenge. We’ll need to: Find a source file. Convert the source file to a ringtone. Get the ringtone [...]
From the Cocoon Wiki, a list of open source and proprietary projects similar to Apache Cocoon. From that list, mod_murka looks neat. It looks for a cached HTML version of the request URI, and if it’s not found, looks for the .xml file, transforms it using whatever stylesheet’s mentioned in the file’s processing instruction, and [...]
[ via Brown Hen ] Leo is an outliner/literate-programming editor written in Python and TclTk. To run it under Mac OS X you need to install TclTk and a version of Python that can talk to TclTk. When you’re installing the Leo scripts, I found that you shouldn’t rename $LEO_HOME/leo.py to $LEO_HOME/leo.pyw, as the instructions [...]
Danny wrote a vim/python macro to wrap selected text as a hyperlink to the top result for that text on Google.
CustomUltraseek is an independent site for developers and administrators using Verity’s* Ultraseek search engine. I used Ultraseek back at EPRI in the late 1990′s, and was impressed with the ample hooks for customizing it through Python. Since I worked with it last, Ultraseek has been updated to consume and index PDFs, Office documents, and XML. [...]
Fredrik Lundh proposes an XML Literal syntax for embedding XML directly into Python. But how do you handle broken XML in the literals?
[ via Jim Roepcke ] Elements is a static site generation framework, written in Python, which has some of the feel of Radio/Frontier. But it’s scriptable in Python, so you get all those great libraries to work with.
Fly Enhancer is an Open Genomics project that provides a free search engine for the Fruit Fly genome for non-commercial research. Not only is it free, but it’s orders of magnitude faster than commerical genome search tools.
I gave in and saw the doctor today. She listened to the wheezing coming from my chest and immediately prescribed an antibiotic, and two inhalers. At least I’m back to work this week. I’ll be at Apple’s WWDC on-and-off as my schedule allows. I’m still looking at Bento, and thinking about implementing it with XSLT. [...]
Brent Simmons at Userland started a weblog devoted to scripting languages on the Mac. He’s got a mess of worthwhile links already.