- E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF

[Alex Martelli]

Ilias Lazaridis <ilias at lazaridis.com> wrote:
   ...
> >>only hire people with long backstabbing histories.
> > 
> > Such as...? Guido van Rossum?  Greg Stein?  Vint Cerf?  Ben Goodger?
   ...
> The employees you've mentioned should have most possibly the basic 
> google employment requirement: BS or MS... [1].

... "or equivalent" (I do believe all I named have at least a Bachelor
degree, but with the undisputable results they've shown afterwards, I
think they'd all meet the "or equivalent" clause anyway).

> I assume that Mr. Vredegoor uses the term "backstabbing" incorrect. Most
> possibly he meand just something like "back reaching".
> Possibly he can confirm.

Let's wait for him to confirm or deny; I thought he did mean what he
said.


> btw: I don't understand exactly what Mr. Vredegoor means by "having 
> worked for the man".
> Possibly he can clarify concisely.

By all means, let's hope he does.  In the jargon of the American
underclass, "to work for The Man" meant working for law enforcement
agencies, and somehow it got widened to "working for ``the system''",
i.e., in a "socially respectable" job.  Maybe in Dutch it means
something different.


> Mr. Martinelli, you seem to know python.

Sorry, that's a brand of sparking apple cider.  I get my name mispelled
that way often enough, since I moved to the US, to have become quite
sensitive about it!-)  In MY name, there is no "in"...

> May you can showcase how to overcome some of the limitations 
> (limitations in context of the evaluation template):
> 
> http://lazaridis.com/case/lang/python.html

re: #LIMITATION: automated get/set methods via var-name not available
see the 'property' built-in.

re: LIMITATION: InstanceVarName not available
since any object at a given time may be bound to any number of names,
from 0 upwards, and none of them has any privileged relation with the
object, this will never be solved.  If you think an object should have a
name with some privileged relation to it, I strongly suggest you switch
to another language.

"prints Class Definition (methods, fields), without code
LIMITATION: no direct access on object-model-level"
not sure what you mean, but maybe see the 'inspect' module.

"#LIMITATION: attribute is not available systemwide in every object
#LIMITATION: attribute is not on object-model-level
#LIMITATION: Operation is not Object Oriented
"
If you think that the syntax x(y,z) is "not Object Oriented", then again
I strongly suggest that you switch to other languages (avoiding other
powerful object oriented languages such as Dylan, Lisp, or O'CAML, which
also allow usage of function-call notation for THEIR OO power); in other
words, if you think the mere presence of a syntax like 'y.x(z)' makes
any difference wrt accessing a functionality versus 'x(y, z)', you're
clearly evaluating things at a totally inappropriate level.

The notation you choose, setattr(Object, "meta", "Some meta
information"), is, at any rate, absolutely semantically identical to
Object.meta = "Some meta information" -- they will both succeed or both
fail, and when they both succeed they will have identical effects; thus,
that point about "not Object Oriented" seems to fall somewhere between
embarassingly wrong, and crazy-level weird.

It IS true that in Python you cannot set arbitrary attributes on
arbitrary objects.  The workaround is to use a dict, indexed by the id
of the object you want to "set arbitrary attributes on"; this has the
helpful consequence that separate namespaces are used, so your arbitrary
setting of metadata cannot interfere with the `true' attributes of the
object in question.

I'm unable to understand what you're trying to do in the "extend talker
code" box following that one.



Alex