Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Sat, 27 Mar 2004
PyCon, Day 3
Unfortunately, I spent more time travelling today than I did at PyCon... more on that in the next post.
The winning talks for today were Bob Ippolito's 60 Minutes of MacPython, David Ascher's Flour and Water Make Bread, and Anna Ravenscroft's talk on distutils. I've basically decided that any Mac applications that I write (if any) will be written in Python using PyObjC. There's just no way that I'm going to learn Objective-C -- too much platform lock in for that -- same with Cocoa. David's talk was useful because he's been in a product company setting for a while, and his talk did a good job of listing the things that business people and open source developer need to do in order to work with and help each other. I got a bit confused during Anna's talk, because her slides were going by too fast for note taking (but not too fast to read), and so note taking got me out of sync. But the content did look worthwhile. I also took a picture of Anna speaking (I hadn' t taken any conference pictures even though I've been hauling around the family camera) so that my girls would see the women are computer people too. Ed Loper's talk on the Natural Language Toolkit gets honorable mention for reminding me of chart parsing and Eugene Charniak's CS241 at Brown.
I'm writing this post on the ferry back home. There'll be more PyCon posts in the days to come.
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4 Comments |
I programmed in Objective-C for a few months, about 4 years ago.
My fellow sufferers and I joked that it was "the worlds first horizontal programming language."
When we heard that Apple was making new super-wide screens, we joked, "Oh! Now maybe we can program in Objective-C!"
The Objective-C API folk had the philosophy that you should always, always, ALWAYS use long descriptive names for everything. And that you should always, always, ALWAYS name each parameter.
The famous one was NSCalendarDate.
And then, if you want to see what tomorrow's like, you've got to write:
I don't remember for sure, but I believe you weren't permitted to rely on default values. I think you had to list every last one.
Holy moley.
Other than that, I thought their class and object model was nifty and friendly. Can't remember why, exactly. But it was. That was all a few years back.
Posted by Lion Kimbro at Sun Mar 28 00:39:54 2004
My fellow sufferers and I joked that it was "the worlds first horizontal programming language."
When we heard that Apple was making new super-wide screens, we joked, "Oh! Now maybe we can program in Objective-C!"
The Objective-C API folk had the philosophy that you should always, always, ALWAYS use long descriptive names for everything. And that you should always, always, ALWAYS name each parameter.
The famous one was NSCalendarDate.
NSCalendarDate *whenLionPosted = [NSCalendarDate dateWithYear:2004 month:3 day:28 hour:0 minute:28 second:0 timeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithAbbreviation:@"PST"]];And then, if you want to see what tomorrow's like, you've got to write:
NSCalendarDate *later = [whenLionPosted dateByAddingYears: 0 months: 0 days: 1 hours: 0 minutes: 0 seconds: 0];I don't remember for sure, but I believe you weren't permitted to rely on default values. I think you had to list every last one.
Holy moley.
Other than that, I thought their class and object model was nifty and friendly. Can't remember why, exactly. But it was. That was all a few years back.
Posted by Lion Kimbro at Sun Mar 28 00:39:54 2004
Maybe you should get used to intent your source? And switch to a decent editor? Objective C shows its Smalltalk ancestry here and that's good: it makes for an easy-to-understand source code. Default values are bad because maybe you know them now but not every reader or you a few months later, and sometimes they change. Your "problem" with long lines could easily be solved by hitting <return> at the relevant places, e.g.
Posted by Nils Kassube at Sun Mar 28 08:30:59 2004
NSCalendarDate dateWithYear:2004
month:3
day:28
hour:0
minute:28
second:0
Posted by Nils Kassube at Sun Mar 28 08:30:59 2004
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