Ben’s posthaven

"Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes." - Erik Naggum

This comes today, just as I'm rediscovering some of the worst offenders of Python's syntax. For example, accessing an instance and class variable "var" are "self.var" (5 chars) & "self.__class__.var" (15 chars!), respectively in Python and "@var" (1 char) & "@@var" (2 chars) in Ruby. The alternative of referencing through the class-name is hackish too as the behavior can't be changed by the inheritor! It's enough to make me want to avoid using class variables! "".join(list) and global functions are other examples counter-intuitive syntax.

Now, I've plenty of love still for Python, I attended PyCon 2006 and am happy to see the new "with" syntax comming in Python 2.5. I just would like to se Python 3000 do better.

Ever since I picked up Ruby on Rails, a Ruby-language web framework for a project of mine, I've been curious about what web frameworks were out there for Python, another of my favored languages. A few of them out there are Django and TurboGears. Another that happened to catch my attention was the web.py a framework by Aaron Swartz whom I recently met at the first (of hopefully many yet to come) Startup school in Boston. Anyway, I was browsing the source of 0.13 of Aaron's framework and noticed something amiss. Specifically, in storify, Aaron was testing isinstance(k, list) on a value k which he had just used to index into an array. Now in Python arrays are mutable, and arrays and dictionaries can only be indexed by immutable values. That's ints, strings, but not lists. Seeing that something was amiss, I sent him a quick e-mail, and now I'm in his changelog entry for version 0.132. I'm reproducing the relevant line here for my future self: Fix bug with storify when it received multiple inputs (tx Ben Woosley). In other news, Apple just announced it was recognizing contributors to their WebCore HTML Layout engine, with gifts of computers and free tickets to Apple's WWDC. They list none-to-trivial contributions to on a blog posting on David Hyatt's blog Surfin' Safari. One could call these events arguments both for the model of open source, and for code reviews as well. But then my evidence is anecdotal, so you're welcome to your own interpretation.