Viridia.org

Lately I’ve been quite involved with the Python language, in particular discussions of the future evolution of the language on the various Python.org mailing lists. In fact, I’m currently the author (or in some cases co-author) of 4 Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPS):

• PEP 3101: Advanced String Formatting
• PEP 3102: Keyword-Only Arguments
• PEP 3115: Metaclasses in Python 3000
• PEP 3119: Introducing Abstract Base Classes

Several of these have been officially accepted, others are still under consideration. Only the last one, 3119, has any significant unresolved issues.

In addition, it appears that I am going to be part of an informal discussion group at Google consisting of a number of Python developers – including Guido van Rossum, the creator of the language – who will be meeting regularly to discuss the ongoing development of the language.

I’m very excited about all of this, in partular I’ve been feeling for a long time a need to be “part of something” that I think is important, and more specifically part of a community.

I just started working with Mercurial, a new distributed SCM system and I have to say that I am quite impressed. Mercurial is a direct competitor to GNU Arch, Darcs, BitKeeper, Monotone, and other open-source distributed SCMs, however it seems very well architected and polished.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that you not only run it as a command-line utility, but you can run the same program a web server, allowing you to distribute your files over a network; You can also configure it to run as a .cgi script, so that if you have a larger web site, you can incorporate a Mercurial repository within it fairly easily.

The code was pretty easy to set up and use. Within less than an hour, I was able to:

• Compile and install the package on my laptop.
• Create an initial repository.
• Check in an example file.
• Compile and install Mercurial on the remote host I use for viridia.org.
• Propagate the changes from my laptop to the server.
• set up Mercurial to function as a .cgi script.
• write a .htaccess file to tell Apache to use it.

You can see the result here.

I’ve been working on a Thesaurus.

I’ve always been fascinated by thesaurii – I used to read Roget’s when I was a teen-ager (although read is probably a less accurate description than surf.) I also have had many an occasion to use a thesaurus in my programmig work, when I want to name something.

I’ve decided to create a programmer’s thesaurus. I looked around on the web, and while there are quite a number of computer dictionaries, there was no “computer thesaurus” that I could find.

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