Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Thu, 17 Jul 2003
java.net
Here's some encouraging stuff on the java.net front:

Daniel Steinberg's post today include a reference to Danese's unsantized notes on the first java.net community meeting.

Daniel also pointed to Andy Oliver's java.net Wiki pages on rethinking the JCP. Allowing and even encouraging voices of dissent is something that java.net needs to aspire to if it's to be taken seriously as a real community for Java.

[00:55] | [computers/programming/java] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
Mozilla Patronage?
At OSCON one of the talks I anticipated the most was the Ticketmaster talk on a Patronage model for supporting open source. So I found it interesting that Anil Dash is advocating that Google become a patron of either the Mozilla foundation or some of the Mozilla engineering team. Seems like the right thing to me.
[00:47] | [computers/open_source] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
IRC Channel rules
I've never been a big IRC user, but that's slowly changing as I get more involved in projects that have an IRC culture. Certainly I got a big immersion in that culture as OSCON. So Charles Miller's posting on IRC Channels is very timely for me.
Here's the counter-intuitive part: having a clear command structure and defined rules creates more conflict than not having them. People, instead of dealing with problems between each other, take them to the arbitrating body. People don't compromise when they can ask the command structure for a black and white decision.

When the strict rules and command structure go away, people have no recourse but to settle their differences one way or another.

The patterns not new, but it's interesting to see how many places it pops up.
[00:42] | [computers/internet] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
Test-first is a command line interpreter for non-interactive languages
Sometimes the lights just go on. This might not be that enlightening for curly brace programmers, but it was for me. Patrick Logan has a great observation about the way that programmers work in languages with a command line interpreter.
I do think that there's more discipline in TDD, which would help developers in interpreted languages. The testing part isn't always that explicit -- taking up the discipline of saving the tests to be repeated is good.
[00:37] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
Is Python crufty?
Russell is digging in to Python, and has found some things he doesn't like:
But the problem is that Python is definitely crufty. There are so many spots where you can see how the language has been expanded - by force if necessary - throughout the years. Things like the way running an app works: you write a function that tests to see if matches "__main__", instead of an actual main() function. The fact that *every* method in a class needs to refer to "self" first (i.e.: method(self, otherParam) ) is ugly. And self isn't actually a reserved word, just a "strong convention". Ugh. As I learn more, I find more. In my opinion, Python could definitely use a new version rev, drop backwards compatability and clean up the cruft.
I agree that the __main__ thing is crufty. I don't agree about the explicit self argument to methods. If you are coming from a single dispatch O-O language, like Java or Smalltalk, then you will feel this to be crufty. If you are coming from a multi dispatch language like Lisp's CLOS, Dylan, or Cecil, you will find this to be entirely natural. The pill is still red.
[00:32] | [computers/programming/python] | # | TB | F | G | 3 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post


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Ted Leung FOAF Explorer

I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
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