Spyced

Python database tools have tended to suffer from the the 80% problem . (Open-source hackers tend to come up with solutions that solve 80% of a problem. Then someone else comes along and covers a different 80% of the same problem. And so on, so you end up with different solutions that attack the same problem, none of which are general enough for others to build on.) SQLAlchemy is making this a thing of the past, thanks to Mike Bayer's hard work. And, increasingly, others. SQLAlchemy made its second major release today, the big zero-dot-two-oh. (Mike is conservative with version numbers; most projects would call this 0.9 if not 1.0.) There's also a migration guide for porting 0.1-based code. SQLAlchemy lives up to its billing as The Python SQL Toolkit and Object Relational Mapper. (Emphasis mine.) This is possible is because of the extensive under-the-hood effort Mike has expended keeping dependencies to a minimum; you really can build on its functionality at any level...

My friend Paul introduced Noodle at the Utah python user group a week ago. (Yeah, sorry about the not-exactly-breaking-news.) Paul's a Lisp expert -- I think from before he was a Python expert, but I'm actually not sure of the chronology there -- and he wrote Noodle to create a pythonic Lisp dialect. Noodle combines Lisp syntax and features like macros with Python-ish syntax for lists, dicts, and tuples, and compiles to Python bytecode so it can easily leverage all the Python libraries. This bears repeating: there are a lot of projects out there that try to produce Java bytecode or CIL, but Noodle is the first I've heard of that produces Python bytecode. Pretty cool, if you ask me. His slides are linked from his blog, but basically his conclusion so far is that it turns out to be harder to integrate python-style syntax into Lisp than he'd hoped. Not hard as in implementation, but hard as in making it non-clunky to use. The warts are small small individually bu...