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In search of productivity

February 18, 2012 in Coding | No comments

Once upon a time, I started to learn programming in C++. It turns out that it’s hard (for some value of “hard”) to do a lot of basic things in C++. As a budding programmer, I spent more time struggling to make myself understood to the compiler than writing code.

When I was introduced to Python, suddenly programming was fun again. It was hard to imagine going back to anything like C++ when I could become so productive so quickly with Python.

I held to this view for a very, very long time. I appreciated how languages like C++ or Java would be useful for writing “serious” applications, but I didn’t write that stuff. That was for other people.

In the last year or so, I’ve gradually come to believe that a strong type-checking system AND a high-productivity language ought not and are not mutually exclusive. The corollary is that I will consider carefully before I use a scripting language for anything more than a thousand or so lines.

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Python, Python, Python

August 31, 2011 in Coding | 1 comment

Oh, god. I still have a bunch of rant left in me. So here we go, Internet: yet another angry rant to add to the pile.

Sometimes, in the course of one’s life, one is left with a one-off task. In this case, I needed to call a binary a whole lot of times, and do something with the output each time. The details aren’t important; I just needed to write a wrapper script for this binary, do a modest amount of processing on it, and then output the result to a file. This is a pretty common task, one to which the command line in general and *nix in particular is well-suited.

Now, for various reasons, I prefer not to do this via shell scripts. I don’t have a hard and fast rule for when or why. Unless you routinely write shell scripts (I don’t), you’ll inevitably spend a bunch of time looking stuff up that you looked up, oh, six months ago. Or at least I do. I don’t enjoy it, so if I can’t do it with a few commands, maybe one loop or so, then I prefer to use a scripting language. I have the advantage of better/clearer failure modes and simpler syntax and I feel like I’m learning something more powerful and more widely applicable in the process.

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Markin’ it down

July 19, 2009 in Technology | No comments

I’m giving Markdown a shot. I got sick of HTML. It’s cumbersome and not pleasant to read, and wyswig editors that operate with HTML under the hood have their own set of problems. Given the choice, I prefer a Wiki-like syntax. Markdown’s a lot like this; it’s human-readable but powerful in terms of the formatting it allows you.

Once I found a WordPress plugin and a Vim syntax file, I was all set.

What’s more, Ubuntu has a package called python-markdown. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll use Markdown for anything other than blog posting, but on the other hand, it’s awfully tempting to take advantage of this kind of intuitive, powerful formatting.

Yes, I’ve taken a step down a dark path: I’m writing blog posts in Vim, in Linux. Although I use it for coding as often as possible, I’ve thus far avoided it for anything like actual writing.

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readline, Python, IPython, and Mac OS X

June 11, 2009 in Technology | 4 comments

All right, so maybe I’ll finally use this space.

If you’ve tried to get IPython working on Mac OS X Leopard (that’d be 10.5, and 10.5.7 in particular) with an Intel based CPU, you’ve probably had some problems. I know I did! Let me cut to the chase, with a more technical explanation to follow. Oh, and some mild bitching, too.

I’m following the instructions I originally saw here, on IPython’s Launchpad site.  Yes, my instructions are merely a reprint of someone else’s bug report. More on that after I explain.

Quick instructions

I’m going to assume you haven’t downloaded anything, although if, like me, you wrestled with this for a while, you can still do these steps and it’ll work. It worked for me, anyway. :/

  1. Download the .egg for readline, presumably the latest version. Get IPython if you haven’t already. As of this writing, you can get it here at the IPython download site. You can s/i386/fat/ if you like.
  2. Copy it to a directory, such as ~/python.
  3. You can try to install readline and IPython: sudo easy_install readline ipython. One or both will fail.
  4. Open /usr/local/bin/ipython in your favorite text editor, and replace the contents of the file as described at the IPython Launchpad bug linked above. The key is to hardcode readline into the Python system path immediately after sys, and then to launch IPython explicitly.
  5. Launch ipython.

You should be OK now, tabbing and all. If you haven’t checked this shit out, using IPython for your system shell, I highly recommend that you do. It’s none too shabby. There’s a book on this, too.

Technical stuff after the jump.

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