> I guess. > > Though I can't say I find there to be much consensus out there about what > language features truly make for robust software development from group or > community efforts.
There's a long history of coders seeking consensus, but not arriving at any set in stone answers (no carved tablets at the Smithsonian), in part because the backdrop is always shifting, in terms of languages and technologies. The design patterns movement is the latest chapter in the series, drawing inspiration from that 'pattern language' book beloved by the architects, and followed by a big splash by the Gang of Four (an allusion to recent Chinese political history). O'Reilly's 'Head First Design Patterns' is one of the most pedagogically sophisticated in this tradition to date (I'm still somewhat awed by it, though I've heard others express a wish for still greater content density): http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hfdesignpat/ We had the structured programming revolution, which tossed out the GOTOs, and the object oriented revolution. Under the hood, we've been moving to virtual machine platforms with their own byte code languages. This paradigm has taken over at Microsoft and places (i.e. .NET). Python is one of these VM languages, as are Java and C# (the latter being system languages, less agile, yet very necessary, as implementation languages for Python itself among other things). > Python itself can be thought of as a robust community > effort - in C, which itself probably pre-dates/ignores much of the lessons > of what is necessary for such effort. Java seems obsessed with these kinds > of concerns - which is why I do in fact find coding in it as a solo as a > kind of foolishness. And now we have IronPython in C#. C is like clay -- it can be anything you want it to be if you're good at it, which Guido and friends are (I'm not -- I enter the picture as an xBase coder, working up the dBase II, III, IV, FoxPro fish ladder (we've always had an interactive 'dot prompt,' which is why Python's >>> seems so natural to us (there're other FoxPro geeks out there, bending a Python framework into a familiar shape (named Dabo), as I learned at Pycon in DC last March [1]))). The object orientation was always there in Python, but user-defined classes were originally 2nd class citizens. Getting them to be top level, unifying types and classes, has been a long haul saga within the Python community. I'm still a bit hazy myself on how to subclass some of the primitive types. Where do you store the value? I appreciated getting a history lesson on Python's origins and early evolution from Guido himself in Sweden, where he talked to a packed upper floor room full of mostly newbies (EuroPython had a friendly newbie track). > OTOH, I find code readability absolutely satisfying, even without an > expectation that anyone else will in fact be reading it. > > Whatever. > > Art I'm glad to hear it, as I do expect PyGeo code will be eyeballed by many more newbies as time goes on, ready to get their feet wet as strangers in a strange land. Your coding style will be an early influence on these little penguins. One of the challenges I had @ OSCON was how to talk about Elastic Interval Geometry (EIG) as inspired by Kenneth Snelson and others, without being off topic. Because the best open source EIG apps are written in Java (Springie and Fluidiom), and the best closed source offering (Alan's SpringDance) is in Delphi. My solution: write the presentation manager itself in Python, such that at any given moment, even if the slides were showing Java creations, the screen itself would be Python + Pygame driven (I also went out over the Internet to demo the Java applets live, but only for a few minutes). This strategy worked well IMO (plus I got positive feedback from people in the audience who came up to me during the rest of the conference). My code, though somewhat quirky (look at the weird way I pass parameters -- inside a parameters object), isn't especially crash prone, does what it's supposed to do.[2] I too am an influence, and fortunately just one of many (my stuff should be part of a balanced diet). Kirby [1] http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2005/03/pycon-2005.html [2] http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/oscon2005.html _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
