Archive: December 08, 2005

Thursday, December 8, 2005

1. Glenn Reynolds:

   As I've said before, if you read the news coverage and it leaves you dispirited, demoralized, and depressed, that's not an accident. That's the goal.

   Also read the positive news from Iraq.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

2. O'Reilly Radar > Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python (via Dave Thomas). David Hansson has comments (via Sam Ruby):

   Ruby book sales have exploded. In total, Ruby is up 1,552% over last year in the same period. That's one thousand, five hundred, and fifty two percent. Holy smokes. It's insane!
   
   To bring that number into perspective, Ruby books are now selling better than Python books. Which of course is the first time that ever happened. And that language was not even standing still. Python is up 20% over last year. At the same time, Perl is down 3%, Java down 4%. So its no wonder we have a feeling that the duo of modern, dynamic languages are taking off. It's because they are!

     ¶ (1) Tags: [Programming, Python, Ruby]

3. The Piehead News - "Free" as in "Taxes". Heh.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

4. 40 Reasons for Gun Control (via Joel Dueck). Based on Michael Williamson's It's amazing what one has to believe to believe in gun control. Mostly excellent.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

5. Alex Bosworth's Weblog: 10 Places You Must Use Ajax (via Paul Hammond).

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Ajax]

6. AHAH: Asychronous HTML and HTTP (via Paul Hammond). The idea is, it's basically Ajax, but instead of grabbing arbitrary XML and processing it on the client-side with Javascript or XSLT and inserting things into the DOM, you just grab bits of (X)HTML from the server and inject them directly into your page. So, the client side does much less logic and merely needs to say "replace the content in the element with this ID with the (X)HTML at this URI".

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Ajax]

7. My friend's girlfriend's brother runs a movie theater, so I get to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tonight

     ¶ (4) Tags: [TV/Movies]

8. Luck Factor, by Richard Wiseman. Seems like it could be an interesting book.

     ¶ (0)

9. Aaron Swartz: Rewriting Reddit (via Chris Double):

   My friends over at reddit.com rewrote their site from Lisp to Python in the past week. It was pretty much done after one weekend. (Disclosure: They used my web.py library.) They knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code than ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain.

   On how he designed web.py's API:

   The way I wrote web.py was simple: I imagined how things should work and then I made that happen. Sometimes making things just work takes a lot of code. Sometimes it only takes a little. But either way, that fact is hidden from the user -- they just get the ideal API.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]