Python-URL! - 1999/08/30

by David Ascher - DejaNews: [1]

Highly biased highlights from the O'Reilly conference

Tom Christiansen joins Guido and a few other Pythonistas for beer and random trivia (does || or && bind tighter in C?). A jovial time was had by all, and nothing caught on fire.

There were more folks looking for Python programmers than Python programmers looking for a job! The future's so bright, we gotta wear shades.

eGroups CTO Scott Hassan says that they pump 30 million emails a day with Python without breaking a sweat, and expect to scale up to 200-300 million personalized emails per day. Big numbers for a 'slow' language!

When Adam Feuer was asked whether he was having fun, he replied: "I'm having a blast -- I've been using Python for six months, and I feel like I'm having an affair with the language!"

• See also http://www.linuxslides.com/ http://www.vwtapes.com/cgi-local/vwcart.pl?page=/oreilly/99/python.html

Having the old fogies out of the way spurred activity on the newsgroup

• One old fogie remained: Fredrik Lundh "parses arbitrary python expressions" he doesn't trust (see DN506369193) and Bernhard Herzog shows how to sneak in statements (see DN506541895)
• Arpad Kiss provides one minimal example of how COM can be useful by retrieving document properties into a Py- thon process (see DN508285498)
• David Niergarth "unmangles" a Win* "long name", but only with difficulty. No better solutions appear (see DN510820469)
• Colin J Williams describes Hans Nowak's page of "snippets" as "clean and well-organized" http://www.hvision.nl/~ivnowa/snippets/
• Karl Putland retrieves a collection through COM (see DN505637404)
• Charles G Waldman carefully illuminates several alternative ways to shuffle cards (see DN513914923) Nihilist Tim Peters, once again misremembering which is the "dismal science", counters that "even the best possible al- gorithm ... is terrible" (see DN514317775) Other poetry from the same thread: Mersenne Twister, tears- in-the-rain, Chi-squares, /dev/random
• People seem to argue a lot about nothing, specifically: The necessesity of pass statements in empty blocks, and whether returning None is a trap. Some of the more useful posts (see DN516955938) (see DN518128657)
• More usefully, some etymological truths are laid bare, specifically regarding nautical techniques thanks to Fredrik Henbjork the fisherman (see DN515457138) and Tim Peters and Kent Polk argue about who the real mathematical geniuses are (see DN518132556)
• In a blast from the past, what used to be Ted Nelson's Xanadu is bared to all, and some might be surprised to know what languages it's written in http://www.udanax.com/