[Baypiggies] great talks

[Drew Perttula]

Two excellent talks tonight! Thanks to both presenters. In particular, I
was impressed with the enthusiasm behind Mercurial and the results it's
leading to, and the ease of getting simple C++ to automatically compile
into a usable extension-- not even considering the extra features of
NICL. Using distutils was especially clever.

In the rest of the evening, some of us got to talking about other cool
projects. I'll just list them here in case anyone's bored and wants
stuff to look up:

RDF and SPARQL

  don't miss: complex database structures with no schemas or SQL
              easy-to-debug flat file version of your data can be
migrated in and out of a faster database with no information loss or
code changes
              SPARQL queries look almost the same as the original data
(in n3 syntax), but with wildcards in the positions that you are
querying for

py.test

  don't miss: --looponfailing mode
              stdout-hiding
              expression tree expansion

darcs

  don't miss: you can record a patch made of only certain lines or made
of a rename (that overlays other patches)
              well-done nethack-style console UI
              killer shell completion for zsh/bash

zsh

  don't miss: concise-zsh to clear-python compiler (doesn't actually
exist yet)
              best completion around
              best line editor (supports multiple lines at once in your
shell)
              best glob modifiers (you'll rarely need the find command,
it can be replaced by a few chars)