Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-09 Thread Thomas Nelson
I thought the paragraph about provability was interesting.  Presumably
the author refers to proofs in the spirit of A Discipline of
Programming from Djikstra, 1976.  Unfortunately, I don't think anyone
has writting much about this since the 70s.  I'd be interested to learn
if anyone's tried to write weakest precondition style specifications
for python (builtin functions, for, lambda, etc).  Or perhaps there's
some easier to understand medium?

It's worth noting that the author makes proving correctness sound like
a trivial task, which of course it's not. Consider

def collatz(n,i=0):
if n==1:
return i
elif (n%2)==0:
return collatz(n/2,i+1)
else:
return collatz((3*n+1)/2,i+1)

It is currently unknown whether this even terminates in all cases.

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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-08 Thread Christos Georgiou
On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 11:11:14 +0200, rumours say that Azolex
[EMAIL PROTECTED] might have written:

   At-least Pythetic isn't a word (yet).
 

:))) now that's quite pythetic !

Well, pythetic could become a synonym to un-pythonic.
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please stop spamming us.
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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-07 Thread Azolex
Michael Yanowitz wrote:
 
   At-least Pythetic isn't a word (yet).
 

:))) now that's quite pythetic !

hmmm, clearly that word could become damaging to python,
so I suggest the best course is to preventively focus the meaning
in a way that prevents the danger, by providing canonical
examples of, hem, pythos, that will direct the contempt away
from your beloved programming language.

My contribution (2001) :

filter(lambda W : W not in ILLITERATE,BULLSHIT)
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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-07 Thread bruno at modulix
Peter Hansen wrote:
 Mirco Wahab wrote:
 
 Hi Ralf

 So we should rename Python into Cottonmouth to get more attention.


 No, always take some word that relates to
 something more or less 'feminine', its about
 96% of young males who sit hours on programming
 over their beloved 'languages' ;-)

 Pythia? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia)
 
 
 I guess that would make our motto Pythia: now you're programming with
 ethylene.

Who said programming in Python was a r'P[y|i]t(hi)?a' ?-)

(oops, sorry ---[])


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p in '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.split('@')])
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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-06 Thread Mirco Wahab
Hi Ralf

  Perl, named after Pearl Biggar (Larry Wall’s fiancée),
 
 His wife was Gloria since at least 1979, perl was published
 in 1987.  This seems to be an insider joke (he wanted to call
 the language Gloria first, then pearl, then perl).

Thanks for pointing this out ;-)

This makes perfectly sense - then. I mean, its
'chromatic' who wrote about that, so at least
something has to hide in each of the jokes ;-)

  set a high standard for naming techniques.
 
 So we should rename Python into Cottonmouth 
 to get more attention.

No, always take some word that relates to
something more or less 'feminine', its about
96% of young males who sit hours on programming
over their beloved 'languages' ;-)

Pythia? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia)

Regards,

M.
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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-06 Thread Peter Hansen
Mirco Wahab wrote:
 Hi Ralf
So we should rename Python into Cottonmouth 
to get more attention.
 
 No, always take some word that relates to
 something more or less 'feminine', its about
 96% of young males who sit hours on programming
 over their beloved 'languages' ;-)
 
 Pythia? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia)

I guess that would make our motto Pythia: now you're programming with 
ethylene.

-Peter

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RE: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-06 Thread Michael Yanowitz


-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf
Of Peter Hansen
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:47 AM
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language


Mirco Wahab wrote:
 Hi Ralf
So we should rename Python into Cottonmouth 
to get more attention.
 
 No, always take some word that relates to
 something more or less 'feminine', its about
 96% of young males who sit hours on programming
 over their beloved 'languages' ;-)
 
 Pythia? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia)

I guess that would make our motto Pythia: now you're programming with 
ethylene.

-Peter

  At-least Pythetic isn't a word (yet).

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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-05 Thread Mirco Wahab
John Salerno wrote:
 There is an article on oreilly.net's OnLamp site called The World's
 Most Maintainable Programming Language
 (http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/03/the_worlds_most_maintainable_p.html).

There is one really interessting (imho) point
in the last part that struck me down:

blockquote
 Aside from a formal specification, which I hope to
 produce in the near future, the language needs a name.
 Here is where many modern languages have done well.
 Perl, named after Pearl Biggar (Larry Wall’s fiancée),
 Ruby (named after Ruby Kusanagi Matsumoto, Yukihiro
 Matsumoto’s youngest daughter), Ada (named after
 Charles Babbage’s first programming student,
 Ada Lovelace), and COBOL (named after Colleen
 Bolero, the heroine of a Ravel operetta) have
 set a high standard for naming techniques.
/blockquote

OMG!

Did you people know that already ;-)

Regards

M.
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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-05 Thread Tim Parkin
John Salerno wrote:
 There is an article on oreilly.net's OnLamp site called The World's 
 Most Maintainable Programming Language 
 (http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/03/the_worlds_most_maintainable_p.html).
  
 
 
 It's not about a specific language, but about the qualities that would 
 make up the title language (learnability, consistency, simplicity, 
 power, enforcing good programming practices). I thought this might be of 
 interest to some of you, and I thought I'd point out the two places 
 where Python was mentioned:

It's interesting to see a slightly different take on type checking..

In the real world it is an error to put five pounds of potatoes in a
ten pound sack

The same might be true of computer games, where a type checker so
careful that it might refuse to allow an operation where a 180-pound
character can carry 10,000 gold pieces might actually remove the aspect
of fun from the game.

Isn't this data validation and if it is, should the compiler be checking
this?

Tim Parkin


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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-05 Thread Paul McGuire
Mirco Wahab [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 John Salerno wrote:
  There is an article on oreilly.net's OnLamp site called The World's
  Most Maintainable Programming Language
 
(http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/03/the_worlds_most_maintainable_
p.html).

 There is one really interessting (imho) point
 in the last part that struck me down:

 blockquote
  Aside from a formal specification, which I hope to
  produce in the near future, the language needs a name.
  Here is where many modern languages have done well.
  Perl, named after Pearl Biggar (Larry Wall’s fiancée),
  Ruby (named after Ruby Kusanagi Matsumoto, Yukihiro
  Matsumoto’s youngest daughter), Ada (named after
  Charles Babbage’s first programming student,
  Ada Lovelace), and COBOL (named after Colleen
  Bolero, the heroine of a Ravel operetta) have
  set a high standard for naming techniques.
 /blockquote

 OMG!

 Did you people know that already ;-)

 Regards

 M.

COBOL = COmmon Business-Oriented Language

I think the author was just testing to see who was reading.  Also, is there
any significance to the publication date of the Conclusion (or the name
selected for the ultimate language)?

Seems like a lot of work for an Avril Fool's prank...

-- Paul




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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-05 Thread Azolex
John Salerno wrote:
 There is an article on oreilly.net's OnLamp site called The World's 
 Most Maintainable Programming Language 
 (http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/03/the_worlds_most_maintainable_p.html).
  
 
 
 It's not about a specific language, but about the qualities that would 
 make up the title language (learnability, consistency, simplicity, 
 power, enforcing good programming practices). I thought this might be of 
 interest to some of you, and I thought I'd point out the two places 
 where Python was mentioned:
 
 from Part 4, Power:
 Of course (second point), a language that requires users to extend it 
 to be productive has already failed, unless it can enforce that there is 
 one obvious solution to any problem and autonomously subsume the first 
 working solution into the core language or library. Python is a good 
 example of this practice. There is a strong polycultural subcommunity in 
 the world of free and open source, and the members of this group 
 consider the lack of competing projects in Python (one XML parser, one 
 logging library, one networking toolkit) to be counterintuitive and even 
 counter to the goal of language progress. They’re wrong; this is 
 actually a strong force for cohesion in the language and community, 
 where the correct answer to a novice’s question of “How can I parse 
 XML?”, “How can I publish a database-driven web site?”, or even “How can 
 I integrate the legacy system of an acquired company from a different 
 industry with our existing legacy system?” (to prove that this principle 
 does not only apply to small or toy problems) is usually “Someone else 
 has already implemented the correct solution to that problem — it is 
 part of the standard library.”

xml templates ? ORM ?
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Re: The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language

2006-04-05 Thread Ralf Muschall
Mirco Wahab wrote:

  Perl, named after Pearl Biggar (Larry Wall’s fiancée),

His wife was Gloria since at least 1979, perl was published
in 1987.  This seems to be an insider joke (he wanted to call
the language Gloria first, then pearl, then perl).

  set a high standard for naming techniques.

So we should rename Python into Cottonmouth to get more attention.

Ralf
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