Skip to main content

Laszlo pycon slides

Unfortunately, not everyone who presented at pycon got notes to the python.org archive. One of the ones I was particularly hoping to see was Oliver Steele's talk on OpenLaszlo, partly because I love Jython (contributed 8 or so patches about a year ago, some of which have recently been applied now that Samuele isn't the only one with CVS access) but mostly because Laszlo is pretty damn cool. "Ajax" has all the press recently but I think the Laszlo approach has a lot more going for it, especially if IE 7 stays in the dark ages.

Fortunately, Oliver just recently put up a a pdf of his openlazlo slides. Unfortunately there's a lot of blank slides, and rather more diagrams than code. (I think they were limited to 30 minutes, though. Ouch!) What I got out of it was,

  • Porting the ActionScript assembler from Jython to Java roughly doubled the LOC for 10x the speed (seems like they use/used Jython 2.0 though, ancient even by Jython standards?)
  • Jython's ease of development was a boon during prototyping, but
  • Don't be too quick to optimize by re-implementing in Java (or, for CPython developers, C/C++) because "you don't know when you're done prototyping"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...

Why PHP sucks

(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, ...

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...