Before we all become focused on new features for Python 2.1, it would be nice to do a bit more work on raising awareness of the new features in 2.0. There's little point in developing software if you don't actually tell anyone about it, after all.
I'd like to suggest that people try to write some brief articles, just a few pages long, each covering a particular feature in some detail.
Looking through the list of new stuff, the most significant features are:
* Unicode support. (Perl's UTF-8 support still seems incomplete, with developers referring to it as "unusable", so we should definitely try and point out that we have working Unicode support right now.)
* Distutils: an introduction to writing setup scripts for simple Python modules, packages, and C extensions.
* The new XML tools.
* The new gettext support.
* Maybe the linuxaudiodev module, too.
Any other suggestions?
If the story of how a particular feature was implemented is interesting, then that would also make a fine topic for a more developer-oriented publication such as DDJ. SRE or Unicode may be the best candidates for this sort of thing, as their implementation presented various tricky technical problems along the way.
Any volunteers?
--amk
Andrew Kuchling wrote: Before we all become focused on new features for Python 2.1, it would be nice to do a bit more work on raising awareness of the new features in 2.0.
"Doctor Dobb's Journal" would be very interested in articles --- 3000 words (plus or minus), plus some code examples and diagrams.
- Unicode support. (Perl's UTF-8 support still seems incomplete, with developers referring to it as "unusable", so we should definitely try and point out that we have working Unicode support right now.)
Definitely --- the practical details of implementing Unicode, and a Unicode-aware regular expression engine, would be very interesting to our readers. However, please steer clear of saying, "And anyway, Perl is broken." (I just got a review copy of Hunt and Thomas's book on Ruby. There are three places in the first two chapters where they say, "And Ruby has more users in Japan than Python." I'll finish the book anyway.)
- Distutils: an introduction to writing setup scripts for simple Python modules, packages, and C extensions.
Possibly interesting; would be more so if Distutils could be applied/was being applied to installation problems in other languages.
- The new XML tools.
Definitely.
- The new gettext support.
- Maybe the linuxaudiodev module, too.
These are both probably too specialized...
Any other suggestions?
The garbage collector: Java and Ruby both score points by having full garbage collection, so its availability in Python 2.0 (along with a discussion of the things that might break or change as a result) would be very interesting.
Thanks, Greg (a contributing editor with DDJ)
On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 12:53:31PM -0400, Greg Wilson wrote:
The garbage collector: Java and Ruby both score points by having full garbage collection, so its availability in Python 2.0 (along with a discussion of the things that might break or change as a result) would be very interesting.
This is on my todo list. I think there are some interesting implementation issues. Also, the article would be useful documentation for python-dev type people.
Neil
On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 12:53:31PM -0400, Greg Wilson wrote:
"Doctor Dobb's Journal" would be very interested in articles --- 3000 words (plus or minus), plus some code examples and diagrams.
I was thinking more about on-line places such as oreillynet.com/python/, but DDJ would be better still.
The garbage collector: Java and Ruby both score points by having full garbage collection, so its availability in Python 2.0 (along with a discussion of the things that might break or change as a result) would be very interesting.
Arising out of lunch-time discussion, a comparison of how different FFIs (Lisp, Java, Smalltalk, others?) deal with garbage collection would be interesting, though perhaps unsuitable for DDJ, since the topic is a rather unfocused one.
--amk
"AMK" == Andrew Kuchling akuchlin@mems-exchange.org writes:
AMK> On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 12:53:31PM -0400, Greg Wilson wrote:
"Doctor Dobb's Journal" would be very interested in articles --- 3000 words (plus or minus), plus some code examples and diagrams.
AMK> I was thinking more about on-line places such as AMK> oreillynet.com/python/, but DDJ would be better still.
And, of course, there's the Python conference: http://python9.org/
The garbage collector: Java and Ruby both score points by having full garbage collection, so its availability in Python 2.0 (along with a discussion of the things that might break or change as a result) would be very interesting.
AMK> Arising out of lunch-time discussion, a comparison of how AMK> different FFIs (Lisp, Java, Smalltalk, others?) deal with AMK> garbage collection would be interesting, though perhaps AMK> unsuitable for DDJ, since the topic is a rather unfocused one.
A comparison of different FFIs with respect to garbage collection might be interesting; hard to say without seeing what the conclusions are.
Jeremy
On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 12:31:47PM -0400, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
And, of course, there's the Python conference: http://python9.org/
That's preaching to the converted, though.
--amk
participants (4)
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Andrew Kuchling -
Greg Wilson -
Jeremy Hylton -
Neil Schemenauer