Goldstein & Alger developed an OO design method that was clearer than UML or Booch and better founded in theory. It was a standard in EDS but has vanished into obscurity. Maybe it's time to look backwards for some insight or at least pick up an old copy of their book for the pleasure of a clear read of what OO development is all about.

Hopefully this isn't as controversial as adding setuptools. :-) Comments to python-dev and/or web-sig at python dot org, please.

Barriers to taking up a product or language are much smaller than people think, like the almost-invisible height difference in a sidewalk (pavement) over which you trip. Tool vendors and proponents of languages find themselves staring in disbelief at an apparently irrational rejection of their favourite.

In a recent developerWorks article, Andrew Glover suggests you continuously monitor code metrics to help you correct code quality problems, which could affect the long-term viability of your architecture. How useful have are code metrics in practice?

For languages and published APIs breaking compatibility has a cost, but so does creeping entropy.

In a recent blog post, John Clingan traces the patterns of application deployment from one application per server to a model where an app "runs somewhere on a grid," and to a dynamic infrastructure that includes the virtualization of app containers and applications as well, trends that hold important implications for developers.

Yesterday I gave a talk on Python 3000 at the ACCU 2006 conference in Oxford. The slides are now online.

Please spread the word -- Google is giving away money to students for writing open source Python code! I'm simply repeating Neal Norwitz' post here.

Refactoring is a wonderful thing. It lets elegance evolve, instead of making you live with faulty initial design decisions for the life of the project. Unit testing makes it possible to refactor safely, for sure. That's an important reason for unit tests. But the need for unit tests goes well beyond that...

For some time now, my intuition has been telling me that the Twisted Matrix is something that would be good to understand. Maybe it's just from seeing the kind of energy that the Twisted guys exhibit at Python conferences.

Why don't we treat it like a set of tests?

Michael Feathers recently suggested that maybe static typing is a form of bad coupling which we could do without. Well in C++ at least you can bridge static typing and dynamic typing.

Here's a pointer to Kirby Urner's blog on the workshop I'm participating in today and tomorrow.

A client has expressed interest in using the cross-platform Qt GUI library, in particular with the PyQt bindings, so I began exploring it and the tools that are available, including BlackAdder, which is recommended in the book "GUI Programming with Python: Using the Qt Toolkit" by Boudewijn Rempt.

If it is, maybe there's something we can do to decouple static types and the languages which use them.