Mailman 3 December 2010 - Edu-sig

xturtle online via processing.js !?
by Jurgis Pralgauskis Sept. 27, 2012

Sept. 27, 2012

Hi, I am struggling around with interactive online py tutorials with https://launchpad.net/projects/intro-to-code (ith might become securely sandboxed soon, as pypy made it possible http://blog.sandbox.lt/en/WSGI%20and%20PyPy%20sandbox :) but one more thing is I'd like to let access xturtle functionality online - one possible way could be triggering tkinter to save its canvas to ps, and then convert them with imagemagic and show via web (animated gif or static) - but if pyjamas can render GUI for js (http://www.google.lt/search?&q=pyjamas+python ), mayby there is a way to **translate turtle commands to processing.js analogues** http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/ would it be difficult -- how do you think? -- Jurgis Pralgauskis tel: 8-616 77613; jabber: jurgis(a)akl.lt; skype: dz0rdzas; Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://sagemath.visiems.lt

4 6

Eclipse as Python3 IDE
by kirby urner March 12, 2011

March 12, 2011

Just wanted to share experiences using PyDev plugin within Eclipse, with Python 3... I've not been unable to get pickle to work properly, with the error confirmed by others. Sometimes (in at least one case) an error marker will indicate a module name cannot be resolved, and yet it imports and works anyway. Getting proper syntax-coloring around triple-quotes seems problematic, especially when the first line is empty e.g. """ comments go here """ However, I'm able to get the coloring situation to resolve by moving text around later... On the whole, Eclipse is pretty capable in supplying an interactive shell, lots of different windows. There's even a terminal window option if you want to do ssh into a server right from within Eclipse. As the above difficulties get ironed out, I think Eclipse will continue to serve as a development platform for Pythonistas. It's not the only option, given Visual Studio, Wing IDE etc., but it's one of the better free ones (eMacs, vim -- these do everything too, in the hands of experienced users, Notepad not so much). [ I remember how Jason Cunliffe used to post a lot about Leo to this archive. There's a school of thought that's more into "literary programming" as I'd call it, where comments might be relatively copious, with more hypertext relationships. You get these fancy markups... ] Some of you may be familiar with the O'Reilly School of Technology (OST) and its use of Eclipse as a front end to accredited courses in the many languages, databases and so on. Rather than use the free-standing Eclipse, which is an option, you get a customized student version called Ellipse that runs of their servers in a remote desktop session. This seems a creative approach and gets a next generation of developer prepared with one of the state of the art environments, using some of the best industry standard tools (e.g. Python and MySQL). Kirby PS: in other news, I've continued to focus on the plight of the lone FoxPro coder (which was me for many years, but not just me) and possible migration paths for legacy applications. FoxPro is a dialect of xBase nutured by Microsoft over the decades. It competes with their other products and too many people use it for free (not the original business model, unlike Java's) so the plan is to discontinue support for it by 2015 I think it is. This decision is having lots of boat rocking-ripple effects, It's not automatic that the .NET platform is where to go next, certainly not with VB necessarily. New developers don't want to waste time learning a proprietary dead language that might be hard to come by down the road, so there's increasing pressure to migrate those legacy FoxPro apps that still do valuable work. I haven't been tracking closely and don't know if MSFT is taking IronPython that seriously, in terms of marketing and outreach. Server side apps still seem to be gaining over thick clients in many institutional settings, but again, I'm not posing as having a lot of overview here. Gotta read all those IT mags I guess, but who has the time? Pointers to true story use cases welcome.

2 2

End of 2010... Happy \N
by kirby urner Jan. 2, 2011

Jan. 2, 2011

Code Blit: The string module has translate and maketrans, through multiple versions. In per 3.x, an optional argument listed "letters to delete". The first argument was a kind of mapping, of 256 symbols to itself, except with some letters changed, what we would call a "permutation" in group theory (not promising a bijectional one-to-one mapping, no way, more likely surjective, do we agree?). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKNX8BUWR0g Here we are in 2.6, where the bytes type is not yet operative. IDLE 2.6.5 >>> b'a' 'a' >>> type(b'a') <type 'str'> Now let's replay that action in 3.1: >>> b'a' b'a' >>> type(b'a') <class 'bytes'> Here's my idea of a punctuation filter in 3.x, where the delete characters clause is now a delete bytes clause in the byte type superobject. import string def filterpunc(thestr): return thestr.encode('utf-8').translate(bytes.maketrans(b'',b''), string.punctuation.encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8') See: http://diveintopython3.org/strings.html http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/42659/1763 if curious. This'd be used to strip string.punctuation characters out of any string. Other solutions possible, including with regexps. Suggestions for Features (SFFs -- not as prestigious or important as PEPs but sometimes the genetic precursor of a PEP). Save Session in IDLE or other PyShell: This is probably already out there, in IPython or one of those. It's so cool to be able to interactively bind names to working code in memory, but when you resume your session later, all that has gone away. In some other shell environments, you have the option to hibernate and resume, Smalltalk's being the most famous. Would it come with a source code snapshot version that encapsulates all the definitions as runnable code? The latest version of f, all the latest object values? That's another way to "pickle", to just write out a module that recreates what was there, when run. Python in Mathland: A link to a recent summary that mentions Python quite a bit: http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/browse_thread/thread/3d642708c2f2… Kirby

5 16

cool stuff out there...
by kirby urner Dec. 21, 2010

Dec. 21, 2010

Wow, a link just posted to math-thinking-l: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKK95DAKms How is it Python-relevant? Watch it and see. In other news: a free open source CAS you might want to share about. http://www.mathpiper.org/ (yes, Java not Python -- nice to know what's out there -- compare with SAGE). Kirby

3 5

Python in the news...
by Vern Ceder Dec. 14, 2010

Dec. 14, 2010

Hi, In a surprise move, our local paper actually accepted one of our invitations to come see what we do in Comp Sci at the secondary level, namely our Python elective, which is mostly for first time programmers. The resulting article isn't bad, given that the kids were certain the reporter didn't understand a word they told her... ;) links to the web and printable version are here: web - http://www.jg.net/article/20101206/LOCAL04/312069949 printable - http://www.jg.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101206/LOCAL04/312069949&tem… Cheers, Vern -- Vern Ceder vceder(a)gmail.com, vceder(a)dogsinmotion.com The Quick Python Book, 2nd Ed - http://bit.ly/bRsWDW

3 6

IronLanguages in CS?
by kirby urner Dec. 6, 2010

Dec. 6, 2010

Now that IronPython is out of the MSFT stable, at github, with an Apache 2 license, I'm wondering if any CS classrooms are planning on using it. There's no chance of the plug getting pulled at this point, and Miguel de Icaza, one of new new project leads, has a strong reputation for performance.** My first question was whether Mono now supports the DLR, a set of features the Iron Languages (Ruby, Scheme and Python) helped to inspire in the first place. This O'Reilly blog posting suggests that it does, though I'm wading through lots of apparent politics I don't understand, regarding the authenticity of the patch work: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/05/monodlr_hello_dynamic_language.h… A FOSS stack with Mono should give many coders a running start should they get snapped up by a Microsoft shop, but without indebting the university to Redmond overly much. Some CS departments pride themselves on being Debian-like "clean rooms" when it comes to not concealing or walling off internals. Others just don't have the funds to provide enough workstations with Visual Studio licenses. I've been seeing mixed reviews on whether unleashing these IronLanguages is going to add or detract from their popularity. They're esoteric to say the least, more like academic research projects than commercial endeavors, up until recently anyway. In theory, it oughta be possible to write some dynamite curriculum showing Scheme doing something trail recursive (its best circus trick) inside of Assembly S, with Python (or Ruby) then invoking it seamlessly. Best of both worlds (functional and imperative). But perhaps we're not really there yet. Anyway, thoughts welcome. Kirby ** blogs sometimes compare IronPython to Visual FoxPro, or at least mention them together, as the latter is in the throes of having its plug pulled -- a slow, painful process, with 100K VFP developers looking for a way ahead (just stick with VFP?). I've been testing Ethan Furman's dbf library, available through Python.org "cheese shop" (not called that). Has a familiar API with table.next(), table.previous(), table.bof(), table.eof(). Other ways to mine DBF/CDX/FPT format in the works.

1 0