As I write this, the Nobel Prizes for 2007 are being announced. During the week of announcements, each day includes news of another award being bestowed for outstanding contributions in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economics. As a technophile, the science awards have always been the most interesting to me. This year, prior to the awards, new releases of several scientific packages on PyPI caught my eye and I was struck by the coincidence.
Word came in this morning, via Brian, that Python Magazine is “viable”. That’s great news! I’ve been having a good time reading the articles (and code) you have submitted, and working with Brian, Arbi, and everyone else at MTA to put it together.
So, if you’ve been holding off on submitting your proposal for an article, or subscribing, you can stop waiting. Head over to pythonmagazine.com and take care of both today.
The functions provided are inspired by similar features of the “lazy functional programming language” Haskell and SML. They are intended to be fast and use memory efficiently, but also to be hooked together to express more complicated iteration-based algorithms.
Read more at pymotw.com: itertools
The shlex module can be used to create mini-languages using a simple syntax like the Unix shell. It is also handy for parsing quoted strings.
Read more at pymotw.com: shlex
Brian and I have been compiling a list of topics we would like to have covered in the magazine. Since we’re just starting, the field is really wide-open for anything, but sometimes it is easier to solicit articles about specific topics instead of just saying, “Write for us!”
A few of my personal wishes: We have had a couple of PyGTK articles submitted already, but nothing for any of the other toolkits.
Noah set up a group blog for PyATL members. It will be more convenient to follow announcements there than the Meetup group (do they even have an RSS feed?) though we will still need to post announcements to the python-groups blog separately. It’s sort of too bad that wasn’t set up as a planet-style aggregation, but I guess this works better to control what actually goes out on the feed and there are already 2 different planets for python blogs anyway.
Quote of the week, from Paul Graham’s essay “How to Do Philosphy”:
“Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers,” Rod Brooks wrote, “programs written for them usually did not work.”
Brian Jones made my day when he said he didn’t want to email articles back and forth for Python Magazine. He describes our editorial
toolset, based on svn.
The Python Atlanta Meetup group meets tomorrow night at Turner, on Techwood Drive. This month’s theme is “Zope Related Technologies”. Here’s the schedule:
Oct. 11th Schedule: Round Table Discussion, Lightening Talks, Main Presentation
7:15-7:30 Meet at Turner Lobby. 7:30-7:45 Opening Remarks and setup. 7:45-8:25 20 Minute Interactive discussion Atlanta Plone and/or Derek Richardson 8:35-8:40 5 Minute Break 8:40-9:00 20 Minute Main Presentation: Drew Smathers, Zope 3 9:00-? General Discussion, Coding Sessions