Sat, 06 Sep 2008
My First Day with Python - Initial Thoughts
While I've always been a bit of a perl guy I don't want this post to be
"perl has x and python doesn't" in tone. Which is lucky really as Python
has exceptions and threading as first class features where as perl has...
ahem.
So after spending a chunk of today reading a python book and spending some time writing code here's my initial short list of gripes -
- except IOError
- print adding newlines
- Significance of whitespace in blocks. But not like that.
- The lack of ++
Considering how picky I can be that's a very short list so Python must
sit well with me so far. Now, in order, I can't help but read except
IOError as 'catch everything apart from IOError'. This one bugs me
more than it should but considering how happy native exceptions in the
language made me this just felt mean.
Secondly, print adding newlines. While this might seem trivial
every other language I use on a daily basis has a print function that
doesn't print a newline so this feels weird. At least it's not called
say ;)
Now to the one that I'll get no sympathy on - whitespace in blocks. First up let me say I don't mind about the enforced indentation. I indent anyway so it's not a big deal. I guess I'll hit the odd case when it annoys me (probably involving heredocs) but I've got nothing against it. What does irk me is the lack of block delimiters - whitespace just doesn't cut it for me.
I like my { and } delimited blocks, a nasty voice in my head is telling me to add them but just comment them out ( if x == y: # { ) but that seems very wrong. I've always looked at those examples in C programming books that say...
# incorrect
if ( something )
print("All's well");
wellness++;
# this is wrong because wellness is a separate statement
# and not part of the if
... and thought - "just add the damn braces, you'll be back to add more code later anyway." Now I'm learning a language that seems to want me to slip up like this. I'll either get used to this or move to ruby.
Lastly we have the lack of ++ and --. I know the arguments, I've read
them before. I disagree. I've never done anything insane with ++ and where
I have used it it's saved me typing. Can we have ++ and remove nested
ternary ( ? : ) instead please?
I like Python and I think I'll be investing more time in to learning it.
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Posted: 2008/09/06 22:44 | /python | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 04 Sep 2008
Pragmatic Investment Plan - End of 2008
In the past I've written up a small list of general goals to help measure my technical progress. Over the last few years I've become a lot busier and this habit fell by the wayside. But no more! I've got a quarter left and I'm going to try and complete...
- Write and publish a technical article.
- Attend two technical events.
- Read and review 3 books.
- Write and publish two Perl modules.
- Create a personal Debian repo
- Create 4 Debian packages, at least one of which should contain other peoples code.
- Write 30 blog posts - at least 15 of which should be technical.
- Choose the programming language I'll be learning next year.
Considering this is one of the busiest times of the year I have no idea how far I'll get but I do think it's worth at least an attempt.
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Posted: 2008/09/04 20:34 | /career | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Ubiquity - More Than Just Shiny Chrome
While Google Chrome has been getting all the press coverage recently Ubiquity, from Mozilla Labs, is where all the interesting action seems to be happening.
Ubiquity ticks all the boxes for me, it's a simple, easy to use idea, that'll save me time. It's easily extensible and already has a huge community of people working, enhancing and just trying new things with it. All the things I've come to expect from Firefox and the Mozilla using community.
I personally think this is an important distinction to make - while Google Chrome is a new browser with some great ideas (and a quickly revised EULA) FireFox is a proven, Free platform that encourages extension and has a track record of doing the right thing.
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Posted: 2008/09/04 19:58 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Tue, 02 Sep 2008
Google Chrome - Initial Thoughts
Like most of the techy part of the Internet I dutifully downloaded Google Chrome today and had a little play around. And just like all those other people I'm going to write about it. The difference is I'm very ambivalent about the whole thing.
Chrome seems nice enough. It's quick, works with all the websites I've tried so far and does have a killer feature - the task manager. Finally breaking tabs out in to their own sandbox is an idea whos time should have come years ago. Being able to see which sites are doing hugely evil things with my memory is a wonderful thing. I'm also inappropriately happy with the in-page search showing how many matches it found.
Unfortunately that's about it. While the minimal design and streamlined core functionality are lovely, these days I'm used to my extensions - the web developer toolbar, YSlow and the work flow changing Ubiquity are just too useful for me to give up.
It's not just the fact that these extensions
are missing that puts me off, it's the lack of how to write custom
extensions, searches etc. that feels wrong. Firefox is a platform as
much as a web browser. Using Chrome what is the command line for pulling
out the memory usage for the currently opened tabs? Do I need to
screen scrape a running about:memory? I can't help but think
they'd have three Firefox versions ready for download by now.
So will I be moving over to the new and shiny? Not yet. As useful as the broken out tabs are I need more functionality than Chrome can give me, so while I might use it for some day to day surfing it's no where near ready for me as a developer. Although I;m guessing they never intended for it to be.
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Posted: 2008/09/02 23:08 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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