I’ve just posted a draft PyCon proposal to the PEAK Wiki; I’d be interested in feedback from anyone interested in the subject. Are there any topics missing from the outline that you’d like to see? Conversely, am I belaboring the obvious in it? The...
After thinking through the fact base design a bit more, I think I have a clearer picture: a fact base is a mapping from fact types to fact sets, that supports rules that are invoked in response to change events. I’m here using “fact type” as...
My idea of how the fact-base thing will work keeps evolving in interesting ways. For example, it seems clearer to me now that it’s not necessary to restrict facts to tuples, or to require their state to be externalized. Facts can be arbitrary...
I think I’ve figured out how to solve a slightly different constraint satisfaction problem from the one I was working on Friday. I was thinking about GUI constraints, of the sort used in the Laszlo rich client platform. Laszlo uses constraints to...
Even if one is not religious, ritual and tradition can be life-enhancing. Both of my parents are dead now, but they live on in my Christmas traditions. My mother had made a practice of a special dinner on Christmas Eve, for example. Definitely not a...
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the design of a constraint management system for peak.schema. Among other things, I want the system to be able to check constraints immediately, at transaction commit time, or upon request. Further, it should be...
Bram Cohen, author of the popular Python program “BitTorrent”, recently had some interesting things to say about software architecture:Half of these ‘emotional’ architectural decisions are dogmatically using a past practice in situations where it’s...
Ryan Tomayko spins off a nicePython/Java classmethod tutorial from my Python is not Java article. Check it out.
Glyph Lefkowitz (of Twisted fame) hits the nail precisely on the head, with this incisive summary of why C programmers think Python is slow. After Guido asked the python-dev list for ideas on combatting this common perception, I suggested that...
My “Java is not Python, either” article seems to have raised a few hackles. In retrospect, I realize that the fault is my own. Although I myself said in the article that “frameworks like Zope, Twisted, and PEAK all have interfaces, but since they’re...
Once upon a time there was a little boy – let’s call him R.C. R.C. was not the handsomest boy, nor the fastest boy, nor even the smartest boy he knew, but he was young and full of dreams and potential. He was determined to make his mark on the...
People have now discussed my work in a total of eight languages, that I know of, so far; today I spotted blog posts in German, Russian, and some other language that’s presumably spoken in whatever country .cx stands for. Heck, for all I know it...
