A lighthearted comparison of how successful fiction authors and language designers can accidentally paint themselves into a corner in their first work.

At OSCON I rewrote one of the earliest Python graphics demos I ever did, this time in Tkinter -- a colorful clock. Miguel de Icaza thinks it's cool!

I found this in my drafts, dated Feb 6 2005. I 'll just push it out now unedited. Original summary: I thought it was clear that we should add interfaces to Python, but Phillip Eby reminded me that years ago I rejected them in favor of Abstract Base Classes (ABCs). Why? I don't remember! Which do you prefer?

The Python Style Guide (PEP 8) lists a number of guidelines for the use of whitespace. Since there are still a lot of folks ignoring these rules, here's a proposal for enforcing them.

I used to believe that multimethods were so advanced I would never need them. Well, maybe I still believe that, but here's a quick and dirty implementation of multimethods so you can see for yourself. Some assembly required; advanced functionality left as an exercise for the reader.

I received an email from a compatriot lamenting the planned demise of reduce() and lambda in Python 3000. After a few exchanges I think even he agreed that they can go. Here's a summary, including my reasons for dropping lambda, map() and filter(). I expect tons of disagreement in the feedback, all from ex-Lisp-or-Scheme folks. :-)

In honor of Jef Raskin, kudos to the Gmail team.

I've just spent a few days hunting for a memory leak in M2Crypto, without success. Are there better options for interfacing to OpenSSL from Python? A small rant.

After my last blog, many megabytes on the precise definition of adaptation were posted to python-dev (search for "PEP-246"). Overwhelmed by the discussion, I'm going to propose a somewhat Solomonic alternative.

My two posts on adding optional static typing to Python have been widely misunderstood, and spurred some flames from what I'll call the NIMPY (Not In My PYthon) crowd. In this post I'm describing a scaled-down proposal with run-time semantics based on interfaces and adaptation.

On Dec. 23 I posted some thoughts about this topic, which received a record amount of feedback. Here's a follow-up, based on the responses as well as some thinking I did while off-line for the holidays.

Optional static typing has long been requested as a Python feature. It's been studied in depth before (e.g. on the type-sig) but has proven too hard for even a PEP to appear. In this post I'm putting together my latest thoughts on some issues, without necessarily hoping to solve all problems.

Half book review, half Python-vs-static-languages musings

After being offline longer-than-expected, I can finally post my blog entry on last week's Open Source Conference

For Python programmers, I've got some suggestions on how to write a main() function that's easy to invoke in other contexts, e.g. from the interactive Python prompt when you feel like experimenting.