garnet7

For longer documents, I haven't written in raw html for quite some time. I use Markdown instead, and had assumed that most everyone (except maybe some web designers) uses some form of prettier markup for writing their longer content-heavy documents; either Markdown, reST, or maybe MoinMoin-style wiki markup. Those seem to be the big three (with reST only making it into that group by virtue of being used for the official Python docs, and thus also for many Python-related projects).

He writes in raw HTML? Hm.

Please, let us know how it goes!

> Wake me up when they get serious about supporting Python.

Looks like Allison will be giving a talk on Pynie at PyCon: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/88/

And, regarding difficulty in implementing a given language, hasn't the PCT ( http://docs.parrot.org/parrot/latest/html/docs/book/pct/ch03... ) made that a lot easier of late?

Looks like the carpalx software (mentioned above) can be tuned to find you a layout that doesn't work the pinkies so much.

> It's unfortunate that they never hit their original 5x performance boost.

Give 'em a chance. They're only just out of the gate. :)

> but I don't understand why they believe this could be "blessed" by inclusion into the repository.

Google is, of course, a big company with lots of very smart people, and they rely on Python (and probably want to rely on it more in the future). Given that they employ Guido and also the primary developers of Unladen, the chances are very good that they will continue to vigorously improve upon it until their performance goals are met.

As far as introducing C++ goes, it's going to stay roped off in LLVM land (see [the PEP](http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/) for details).

As far as community support, LLVM has plenty of that.

> I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US.

It's mandatory, but you get to choose which language to study. Choice is generally either Spanish, French, or German (and sometimes Japanese). Most kids choose Spanish (at least, that's what it seems like).

You take a few years of it before graduating high school.

And, as someone else posted, it's pretty universal that most people forget almost all of it as soon as they've satisified either their high school or else college requirements. I don't have any idea if colleges require foreign language credits or not.

Interesting. Sounds like you run, step into, and then modify this big blob of binary data (from the inside!) until you've shaped it into what you want. Weird. :)

> The simplest way to understand this is to realize that you are basically living "inside" the running exe that you're writing.

Ah. Given what I already know, it sounds a lot like opening up a Python REPL, importing all the code you need, and then starting the main loop of the program.

> You're looking through a glass.

Heh, through debugger-colored glasses. :)

I see what you mean though. With C++, if you find your problem, you stop the whole show, go back to your source, take a stab at a fix, recompile, and then run once again in the debugger. With Lisp, you're just there the whole time.

> LispWorks comes a huge image that ...

> In LispWorks you start the image and type to the listener.

I'm very new to Lisp (but not C, C++, Java, Python, and some other similar languages). Can you please tell me what an "image" is?

I think Bazaar would be more useful if they tightened up their docs to be more concise, while also splitting up the tutorial to have each of the pieces more closely focus on one particular way of working, for example:

* you're working on a project at work where the code is available via ssh at `some_host:/var/repos/the-project`.

* you're working on a project where the code is available via http from the author's site

* etc.

Currently, I think the impression they give is that you only use bzr if you're also using LaunchPad. That needs to change.

BTW, are there any other source code hosting sites that support bzr besides GNU Savannah and SF?

This is pretty amazing news. Last I heard, I thought that UnladenSwallow was 2.x-only. Now it turns out that it's going into 3.x and there will be no 2.x Unladen. Wow.

Really great news for Py3k.

I think "T"'s comments on the Python community are depressingly close to the truth.

It is very easy to find pythonistas on python-list who are eager to tell you how wrong you are, or how you shouldn't even want to do <X> because it's not "pythonic".

I think Yegge was right, and that this is the main thing holding Python back.

That said, I still generally like the language itself.

I hate to say this, but if you actually have to ask the developer for some simple docs on something basic like this, that's a big red flag to me.

This is what I was going to suggest.

1. choose a canned forum package,

2. install and configure it,

3. find some moderators; show them how to admin the site and make backups

I've never used phpBB so cannot recommend it.

Edit: maybe have a look at [mwForum](http://www.mwforum.org/).

Thanks for the reply, lispm.

> Lisp Machines from Symbolics, LMI and TI were later based on the hardware and software from the MIT, but they used new processors and the OS was extended.

Ok, after some more reading, I think I'm getting the picture. Genera was the OS on the Symbolics Lisp machines, and the MIT Lisp machines ran some other similar OS. Genera's roots though were in the code from MIT.

> Kent said that he implemented things in TECO that people thought were possible only on the Lisp Machine.

Right. I don't get this. If he's a fan of Lisp machines, why bother spending time implementing solutions to tough problems in TECO instead of whatever Lisp his Lisp machines were running?

Why would he do that, given that Guile is GNU's flavor of Scheme?

I didn't understand that part of the post, but also don't know much of the history here. Was Genera + Dynamic Windows running on these so-called "Lisp Machines", or was it in competition with the Lisp Machines?

And if Kent was such a big fan of Lisp, why was he writing "impossible do on Lisp Machines" programs in Teco? They could be written in Teco but not in Lisp?

In the article, the author seems to be switching their use of trailing slashes. At the top, (paraphrasing) it's

    rsync -arvuz /src/foo /dest/foo/

    rsync -arvuz /src/foo/ /dest/foo

Aw, son of a ...

And I can't go back and fix it either!

s/gnomes/hobbits/

Well, let's hope no hobbits read this website.

dev servers: gnomes

staging: dwarves

prod: elves

Ah thanks. Just plain JSON RPC sounds simplest to me.

You probably want to instead post this at http://www.arclanguage.org/forum .

What's the difference between "JSON in GET/POST" and "REST with JSON"?

> Ruby has mostly replaced Lisp in my toolbox.

Wow. Would love to hear why. Could you list some of your weighted plusses and minuses for Lisp and Ruby?

Yes, I plan to (at some point), thanks, but it will probably take me a while until I get experienced enough at CL to be able to judge how concise it is.

CL is concise? I hadn't heard it described that way. Now, I've certainly heard [Arc](http://www.arclanguage.org/) described as concise.

> I'm only one week into my latest love affair with bzr/launchpad... and so far so good. I hope it doesn't break my heart again.

I'd be interested to hear how it's going after a couple more months.

> When you put the stuff on the wall in a room full of other paintings, it looks like there's a spotlight shining on his paintings and other ones have been sprayed with a light coating of mud.

What is this due to? Cezanne's skill with color? Or something else?