Spyced

I installed a sys.excepthook in my project at work that uses the logging module to record any uncaught exceptions. It didn't work. I did what any lazy programmer would do: ask someone more experienced. "Do you have to set sys.excepthook in each thread?" I asked, more-or-less. "I don't think so," he replied. Hmm. Maybe the developer I'd taken over from was setting excepthook later on in the initialization or somewhere else. ... Nope. Finally I wrote this: import sys, threading def log_exception(*args): print 'got exception %s' % (args,) sys.excepthook = log_exception def foo(): a = 1 / 0 threading.Thread(target=foo).start() Playing with this a bit demonstrates that sys.excepthook doesn't work in subthreads, at all . The documentation doesn't mention anything of the sort. Smells like a bug to me. (I did file one .) I belatedly googled "sys.excepthook threads." (I must have been a bit slow this morning to no...

I run a web game that I started in late 2000, back in the Dark Ages before there was a decent python web toolkit. It runs on a then-current version of the OpenACS TCL-based toolkit. (at around 20kloc, porting it to a more modern system wouldn't be worth the effort now.) Recently, a player suggested that I add a wiki, since my own documentation is chronically out of date and player-run sites tend to suffer bitrot as well. (How many games are you still playing that you started 5 years ago?) So, I backported a modern OpenACS wiki module -- no trivial task; a LOT has changed in OpenACS, and not all for the better -- and was set. Except the module I backported didn't have diff functionality, probably because the various TCL options mostly suck . Enter TclPython , a tcl module by Jean-Luc Fontaine (who is obviously a far better C hacker than I) that embeds a python interpreter. Sweet! My life just got a lot easier: package require tclpython set py [python::interp new] #...

This time I apparently broke it by copying the development spyceconf.py, which among other things references the authentication tag that doesn't exist in 2.0, into the sourceforge site. Oops. (The 2.0.2 release itself wasn't affected.)

Reading Aahz's 2001 OSCon presentation , I ran into a slide that crystalized it [paraphrased]: Perl: There's more than one way to do it Python: There should be one (preferably only one) obvious way to do it Python's threading library is philosophically perl-ish That pretty much says it all. Well, that and the main classes are (still) virtually undocumented. Update: I'm referring to the synchronization classes in this module, not the Thread class, which is straightforward enough.

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...

While Debian was releasing Sarge and Steve Jobs was introducing MacX86 yesterday, Anders Hejlsberg spoke on C# at Microsoft Tech-Ed . James Avery writes : After a couple questions from other people I was able to get in the other question I was dying to ask. What does Anders think about the resurgence in dynamic typing from languages like Python. Basically he said that he understands what benefits people are getting from dynamic typing, but he thinks they can get the benefits of dynamic typing without sacrificing strong typing. He talked about inferring type (what anonymous methods do now with delegates) and how that might be a way to get the coding speed and ease without sacrificing the strongly typed information. Unfortunately, omitting type declarations is only a small part of Python-esque dynamism. One of the smallest, in fact. Far more important are the ability to modify objects and classes at runtime, which allow you to do things in Python that would require code generation (w...

Second bugfix release. Get it here . Changelog: session_dir uses config.tmp by default if no directory is specified fix for session_dir pickling on win32 fix for fileCache pickling bug on win32 reported by Jaros³aw Zabiello fix for sessions + handlers problem reported by Jonathan Taylor * all module init() methods are now run before handlers are called.