Issue #3

Code Hard

March 2, 2012

Code Hard
Pycoder's Weekly (Issue #3) : Code Hard

Issue #3 : Code Hard

 

Friday, March 2nd, 2012


Hi Pythonistas,

This week's issue has been graciously sponsored by SWIX

Up, up and away this week iOS applications and Python were all the rage, some language improvements to Python 3, and much much more.

We promise from next week will have entire list of all the previously sent issues on the website; we are just finalizing the design of the archives page. As always we welcome suggestions on how we can improve the newsletter, just hit the reply button in the email. 

Tell your friends about us. 

Enjoy.

--
Mahdi and Mike
 
News and Latest Developments.

What's New Celery 2.5
A new version of Celery the incredibly useful distributed task queue was released this week. Check it out!

AppEngine Python 2.7
Google has now made the Python 2.7 run time generally available on App Engine. Along with 2.7  support for popular libraries PIL, numpy and lxml is now available. Time to get hacking on App Engine!

Discussions.

Haskell Python Readability
This is an extremely charged discussion about the readability of python and haskell code. This was sparked by a post on Github which was comparing the implementations of Tries for auto completion written both in python and Haskell. Good discussion.

Unicode Literals for Python 3
Guido approves the inclusion of Unicode literals in python 3.  More details on the PEP 414 here.

Projects.

Quiz & Learning Python
This is a very cool iOS application that just tests your general python knowledge. Pretty awesome game to see how knowledgeable you are in Python. It promises to teach beginners and humble experts.

Travis CI now supports Python
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Travis CI, it is a continuous integration server much like Jenkins. Travis has been growing as of late and now fully supports the building of Python projects. We have used it,  it looks good but is often buggy.

Articles.

Python For iOS
This is a really neat Python IDE and interpreter for iOS.  We aren’t quite sure what you would use this for, but it is extremely cool regardless. Python for iOS has an interpreter, script editor, and documentation browser. Grab your iPad and an external keyboard and code to you hearts content.

Django micro-framework
This article is pretty awesome, we love Django here, and we often don’t see why people think Django is too big for small projects, but Software Maniacs take it a step further and actually make it a micro-framework. Good read.

Python Application Package
For those of you who have been following the discussion around improving the way python packages are shipped. In this post Ian sketches out some details for ideas he has for the future of application development and deployment.

httpie
Now this is cool. httpie is a cURL like tool written in python. It’s a CLI frontend for the popular python-requests library. Easily do the things you do with cURL but with a nice interface, colorized headers syntax, highlighted content body, plus a whole slew of other great features. This got added to our toolboxes immediately, check it out!

Comparing all scripting languages.
This a very complete rundown of how to accomplish the same thing in many different scripting languages. This cheatsheet contains snippets for everything from showing the version of the language to dealing with files.

Roll your own autocomplete solution using Tries.
Every wonder how autocompletion works(or at least one common way it works)? Check out this post on using python to roll your own google-like autocomplete suggestions. This post contains code of the python implementation plus a nice visualization if the Trie datastructure works. After checking out this post you might be interested in checking out the wikipedia article on Trie’s for more information.

PyCon US Mobile Guidebook
Get yourself organized for this years PyCon US with a mobile guidebook. Available on iOS and Android, the guidebook lets you see the PyCon schedule, view venue maps, give talk feedback and a bunch of other useful features.

Clojure Implemented in Pure Python
This is an interesting project. The authors thesis is that static virtual machines make poor runtimes for dynamic languages. So he is developing a Coljure implementation in pure python with the idea that you will be able to realize better performance with a Virtual machine more in the ilk of pypy. It will be interested to see where this goes.

Python Closures and Decorators (Pt. 1) & Pt. 2
This series of posts by @fhaard is a pretty complete explanation and tutorial of decorators and python. If you need help understanding decorators or just need a refresher you should check these posts out.

Static Modification of Python With Python: The AST Module
This is a great breakdown of how to do static analysis and modification of python source code using python’s AST module. If you are interested in this, the post has a really great breakdown of the CPython compilation process and how modifying the AST tree actually works. In the post there is also a link to a PyCon talk with further information. Check it out!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Pycoder's Weekly Issue # 4
Mar 9th, 2012

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