Pythonology

Wingware at PyCon 2010

2010-02-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

Wingware is a silver sponsor for PyCon 2010. If you will be at the conference, please stop by our booth in the expo hall or come to one of our open space events (times will be posted on the open space boards and at our exhibit booth). Wing IDE's developers will be available at both locations to take suggestions and feedback, answer questions, and/or to help you get started using Wing IDE with your code base.

We will also be handing out Wingware balsawood gliders and gel ink pens for those that are swag-inclined.

Hope to see you there!

Wingware Python IDE 3.2.4 released

2010-02-01T08:30:00.001-08:00

It has been quite a while since I've announced a new release of Wing IDE here. We are now up to version 3.2.4. Here is a summary of what we added in Wing IDE 3.2:

Support for Python 3.0 and 3.1 and 64-bit Python on OS X
Improved version control integration for Subversion, CVS, Bazaar, git, Mercurial, and Perforce
Added 64-bit installers for Linux
File management in the Project view
Symbol type icons in the auto-completer, based on rewritten type inferencer
Auto-completion in the editor obtains completion data from live runtime when the debugger is active
Perspectives: Create and save named GUI layouts and optionally automatically transition when debugging is started
Improved support for Cython and Pyrex (*.pyx files)
Added key binding documentation to the manual
Added Restart Debugging item in Debug menu and tool bar
Improved OS Commands, Bookmarks, and Templating/Snippets tools
Many, many bug fixes and minor improvements. The change log contains the gory details.

The best way to learn more about Wing IDE is to just try it. There is a tutorial in the Help menu or just add your code to a project, set up any needed Python Path in the Project Properties, and forge ahead.

Wingware Python IDE Open Space at PyCon

2009-03-20T07:02:00.001-07:00

Wingware is a silver sponsor for PyCon this year. If you are going, please come see us! We can help you get Wing IDE set up with your code base, answer questions, give demos, or talk about our experiences developing and selling an IDE for Python over the past ten years. Or just say "hello" and pick up some of our beautiful and functional Wingware gliders. We'll be at booth 117 in the Expo Hall Friday afternoon and Saturday most of the day or find us in our Open Space sessions.

Happy PyCon!

Come to PyCon 2009!

2009-03-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already taken in a PyCon, you may not know what you have been missing.

Indeed you may not know that PyCon is less a conference than a week-long session of intensive technological play. It is a terrific way to meet the Python community in person, to make new connections, to find Python jobs, and to learn more than you're likely to learn at any other conference -- certainly not while you are having this much fun.

Yes, there will be scheduled talks and an expo hall full of vendors. But there will also be open space (self-organized sessions on topics of mutual interest), lightning talks (5-minute, often spontaneous, sometimes hilarious talks) and the "hallway track" (because hanging around is often the most interesting thing of all).

In addition, there will be two days of tutorials before the conference and four days of sprints -- intensive development days for people collaborating on Python or related open source projects -- after the conference.

PyCon 2009 is happening in Chicago, conveniently near the airport, on March 25 through April 2nd, with the main conference days on March 27-29. It is a low-cost conference designed to be affordable for all.

I hope you will come join the Python community in Chicago. As a regular attendee since 2000, I can assure you that you won't regret it!

Making code run on Python 2.0 through 3.0

2009-02-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

I recently had to make a C extension module and associated Python code work with all Python versions from Python 2.0 through 3.0. Initially, I thought this was going to be very difficult but as it turned out I was able to get it working without too terribly much trouble. It took about a week to get 10K lines each of Python and C wrangled into this supports-all-versions state. Here is what I ran into:

For the extension modules

Most of the changes were due to disappearance of the PyString_* and PyInt_* calls. For the most part I was able to use macros to replace these with calls to PyUnicode_* and PyLong_* equivalents under Python 3.0.

I treated all C strings as UTF-8 encoding, since I had control of this from the outside of the module. This made it possible to use _PyUnicode_AsString as a replacement for PyString_AsString (via a utility call that contains #if PY_VERSION_HEX checks). That saved some time since Python caches and deallocates the utf-8 bytes object returned by this call. Before I found it, I had all sorts of convoluted code trying to deal with deallocation in code that under Python 2.x did not have to worry about this because the return value of PyString_AsString is just borrowed memory. However, using _PyUnicode_AsString does allocate memory where before none was allocated and it depends on the string being successfully converted to utf-8, so it (a) adds some memory overhead, and (b) adds a potential point of failure. I was lucky and was able to treat the failure as something I could just log and continue from. That may not be the case in other code.

Extensions modules are also initialized differently under Python 3.0, although that was easily taken care of with another #if PY_VERSION_HEX check.

For the Python code

Fortunately, this code used a logging implementation so had very few print statements. For those that remained and for other similar code that would now cause a syntax or other fatal error I wrote a module pyutils.py that would selectively import either py2utils.py or py3utils.py based on the value of sys.hexversion. That allowed me to place "bad" code in a place where the disagreeing Python versions would not see it. They contained utilities to replace things like:

print, unicode(), callable(), xrange(), etc
Use of removed modules like new or heavily pruned modules like types
''.join(x) where x is a string under Python 2.x and bytes under Python 3.x (so b''.join(x) is needed)

In addition to this, since much of this code was originally written against Python 1.5.2, I had to do away with old uses of the string module (string.join and so forth) but since I didn't have to support Python 1.5.2 as well, it was easy to do that with code that would work from Python 2.0 through 3.0.

Remarkably, that was about it! After all I'd heard about how hard it is to make the same code work with Python 2.x and 3.0, this certainly came as a pleasant surprise. In the end, I spent far more time trying to trace down an obscure threading deadlock issue that was accidentally caused by some of my replacement code than I worked on the actual compatibility changes.

Wing IDE 3.0.5 and 3.1beta3 released

2008-04-28T08:38:00.001-07:00

Wingware has just released two new versions of its Python IDE:

Version 3.0.5 is a bug fix release that improves many aspects of the vi keyboard mode. It also fixes some problems with CPU loading, and various other relatively minor usability issues. Details are in the change log.

Version 3.1 beta3 is a more interesting release: It adds a How-To for using Wing with the Google App Engine, adds support for scanning for sys.path changes in the main debug file (including those used by buildout), makes the integrated Python Shell work better with threaded code, adds a preference for auto-stripping trailing white space on save, and makes lots of minor improvements to the other new functionality in version 3.1 (for details on those see the feature list on the beta testing page).

PyCon and the Python Community

2008-03-18T13:01:00.001-07:00

Socially, I can be pretty dense. This made it possible for me to arrive at a startling revelation at PyCon this year, one that significantly changed my perception of the Python community, and my view of my place in it.

I've always loved going to PyCon and working with people in the community. But it wasn't until I heard David Goodger's opening remarks on Friday that it finally dawned on me how important Python is to many of its members as a community and circle of friends. Or for that matter, how important it is to me as well.

Here's the back story: In the early days of PyCon, in 2004, I heard that David couldn't come to the conference for lack of funds. He'ld been laid off. I sent an email to the docutils mailing list and within hours had enough pledges to pay for his travel and accommodations. One anonymous donor gave over $200.

That was more or less the last I thought of it until I heard David speak about it this year. What he said was that he was not just out of work but also depressed and this show of support from the community ended up meaning a lot to him. It was clear from talking about this with others afterwards that he's not alone in his perception of the community as very personal indeed.

Even if you're not the type to get teary eyed by such stories of unselfish giving from members of our far-flung community (and I admit I do), you can't argue with the sheer brilliance of this approach. As an investment in our collective future, this gesture turned out to pay off handsomely. As many of you may know, David has served as Director in the Python Software Foundation, where he has done a fantastic job as Secretary, and he has worked intensively this year as the PyCon Chairman.

So now I've figured it out, and I am all the more confident of the health and vigor of Python. The motivations run much deeper than I thought, as do the rewards.

This is also why I'm not much concerned about some of the criticisms of this year's PyCon. These things will be fixed next year, and we'll move on.

Every community has its problems. It's just a question of how (and whether) the community comes together to solve them. Like the small rural town where I live, one that strongly resists 21st century corporate intrusions into our 19th century village, I have a feeling that the Python community is not going to be building a Walmart any time soon.

I hope this is useful to those that share my social denseness, or that it may inspire others to practice spontaneous kindness as a way to build community.

Wing IDE 3.0.4 and 3.1 beta1 released

2008-03-07T06:47:00.000-08:00

Wingware released two new versions of its Python IDE this week.

Version 3.0.4 is a bug fix release, most notable for reducing debugger overhead by about 50% per Python instruction executed. The threaded debugger in 3.0.4+ should now be about as fast as the old non-threaded debugger in Wing 2.x. About 16 other bugs were squashed. Details are in the change log.

Version 3.1 beta1 adds some new features including support for pkg_resources style name space merging (used in setuptools and with eggs), stepping through code in zip and zipped egg archives, doctest and nose unit testing support, inline form snippets that appear in the auto-completer, quick navigation to files in the project or symbols in the current editor by typing fragments of their names, and simple word list driven auto-completion in non-Python files.

If you try the beta, be sure to run Check for Updates from the Help menu after you install. Some patches have already been released to fix a couple of problems caused by build issues.

Last PyCon pre-registration day

2008-03-07T06:13:00.000-08:00

Today is the last day to pre-register for PyCon. After that it's just on-site registration, starting next week. Don't delay, because the venue could reach its capacity of 1200 -- currently there are 963 paid registrations, with another 40 or so pending payment.

Last year we had about 560 attendees, and it was 400 the year before that so we're looking at a pretty nice growth curve.

Hope to see you there!

Wing IDE 3.0 released

2007-10-01T10:31:00.001-07:00

Wingware just released version 3.0 final of its integrated development environment for Python. New features include multi-threaded debugging, hover tips with debug data values, auto-completion in the Python Shell and Debug Probe, auto-updating projects, a unit testing tool, better external command integration options, and a few other things.

One significant/interesting addition is support for Stackless Python out of the box. This very suddenly became one of our top-requested feature as game developers started using Stackless for their online game servers.

We've also released Wing 101, which is a free scaled back version designed for teaching entry level programming courses.

Details are of course at http://wingware.com.

Talk on Wingware for Cambridge Python Users Group

2007-09-29T21:16:00.001-07:00

I'm dusting off this long-neglected blog...

John Ehresman and I recently gave a talk at the Cambridge Python Users Group meeting. We talked about Wing IDE and some of our experiences developing it. Here is a description of the talk which includes links to the slides and podcast audio.

Google Summer of Code Results

2005-10-25T14:31:00.000-07:00

Google Summer of Code is done and the results are in. The following are the completed projects that were mentored by the Python Software Foundation:

Adam Kerz -- Universal File System Interface
svn+ssh://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/ufsi/trunk
Carl Friedrich Bolz -- mmpy - memory management in Python
Chun Wei Ho -- PyFileServer
Elliot Cohen -- Python Bayesian Network Toolbox
Floris Bruynooghe --
Python Profile Module Replacement
Gregory Johnson -- Python mailbox module replacement
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/python/nondist/sandbox/mailbox
Jason Gedge -- Wax GUI
Nick Smallbone -- Python memory profiler (also a svn repo)
Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida -- Python Implementation of the Data Access Protocol
Tero Kuusela -- OpenExVis
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/openexvis
Toni Alatalo -- Interactive Python Notebooks
Tzanko Matev -- Mathematica - like Notebook GUI for IPython
mark dufour -- python-to-c++ compiler
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/shedskin

Congratulations to the coders, and thanks to Google for providing the cash that made this possible!

Python's "Answer" to Ruby on Rails?

2005-10-24T19:22:00.001-07:00

At PyCon 2005 there was a lot of buzz about Ruby on Rails and why Python doesn't have a single default or recommended web framework. To some extent the answer is that Python has a much bigger community of developers that worked on web frameworks starting much earlier in the history of the web. To another extent, it might be that Python and everything based on Python is perpetually (and to me frustratingly) under-hyped or under-promoted compared to just about everything else in the world of commercial and even open source software. Python is, like, the epicenter of low key technology.

In any case, lately I keep running into Django and Turbogears, two mega-frameworks for web development with Python.

See this post on the Boston Python Interest Group mailing list and also this blog entry.

I admit I know next to nothing about this, but I will certainly check them out the next time I start a new web development project.

Finally ... a new review of Python IDEs

2005-09-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

For some reason, it's been a long time since I've seen a review of Python IDEs. The Utah Python Users Group just did a Review of Six Python IDEs, including PyDev (based on Eclipse), Eric3, Boa Constructor, BlackAdder, Komodo, and Wing IDE. Needless to say I was happy to see Wing IDE do well, although I also liked this review because it's a great example of what user groups can do.

PyCon 2006 Call for Proposals

2005-09-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

The PyCon 2006 Call for Proposals has just been released. The submission deadline is October 31, 2005.

PyCon 2006 will be held February 24-26 2006 in Addison, Texas (near Dallas), at the Dallas/Addison Marriott Quorum hotel. A day of tutorials will be held the day before the conference, on February 23, and a four-day sprint will be held after the conference, from February 27 to March 2.

This is a fantastic annual Python developers conference, not to be missed if you are serious about Python. Even if you don't have a presentation to make, considering doing a Lightning Talk or bringing a topic to Open Space. See past conferences for a better idea of what will go on at PyCon 2006.

Google "Summer of Code" Funds Students Writing Open Source

2005-06-03T18:02:00.000-07:00

Google has announced a new program that pays students $4500 for the successful completion of an open source project over the summer. This is a great opportunity for Python -- paid students can take care of some of the many projects that would benefit the interpreter and standard libraries. The Python Software Foundation is participating and will provide mentors for the students to work with.

For more information, see Google Summer of Code and the list of proposed Python projects.

Python Success Stories, Volume III

2005-03-28T17:51:00.000-08:00

O'Reilly Associates is going to be printing the third installment of its Python Success Stories. Please consider contributing your story.

This collection is helpful to Python advocates making a "sales pitch" to an audience that is looking for concrete proof of prior success in a particular domain. Existing stories cover applications ranging from feature-length movie animation to air-traffic control.

The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2005. The deadline for completed, approved stories to be delivered to the publisher is June 1, 2005.

For more information, please contact me.

The Case for the Python Software Foundation

2005-03-16T20:55:00.000-08:00

PyCon is coming and part of my job there is to help present the "What is the PSF" talk after the keynote on day two. The goal is to let people know what the PSF does and, hopefully, to generate some additional support in the form of donations, sponsorships, and volunteer time.

So why give to the PSF?

1) The PSF keeps Python free. It does the grunt work to make sure that Python's open source license is legally valid. Unfortunately, it takes more than just slapping a license on some code to make open source. You also need to make sure that contributors to the project formally sign over the rights to the code that they provide. This is a pain in the butt, but it's important. The PSF takes care of this and related legal head aches, which cost some money and a lot of time to deal with. For some details on licensing, see the PSF License FAQ.

2) The PSF is giving grants. This year a smallish initial grant program gave $40K to three out of more than 60 applicants. The grant program is designed to help in areas that the open source community cannot cover well. A great example of this is Jython, which has been falling behind Python in features. A grant called Moving Jython Forward (PDF) was was funded this year. Unfortunately, the available $40K was much too little money to fund enough of the proposals, and quite a few good ones went unfunded. With about 750,000 Python programmers in the world, it would take only $10 per year from 10%, or more realistically $100 per year from 1% to create a fantastic grants program to fund significant portions of Python's development.

3) The PSF funds other activities. Not all projects funded by the PSF exist in the context of the grants program. Some are projects that the PSF defines and makes possible through funding. One example is a project that aims to update both the framework behind python.org and the look and feel of the site. Another that has not yet been funded would build a better framework for the Python Job Board, which due to increasing volume has become a burden to the volunteers that support it. Both are, clearly, very important resources for the Python community.

4) The PSF makes PyCon possible. The annual Python developers conference, PyCon, is 100% community run. But it wouldn't be possible without the PSF, which takes the responsibility for the fixed costs associated with the venue before enough registration money is collected to pay for them. So far the PSF has been able to make a modest income from each event, but there is never a guarantee that this will be the case, especially as the event continues to grow and a larger venue may become necessary.

In short, the PSF does a whole lot of good in the world of Python. If you benefit from Python, please consider giving back the community by volunteering and/or donating to the PSF. We can accept credit cards, checks, and payments made via PayPal.

Python's Niche?

2005-03-12T18:38:00.000-08:00

A few years back I started pythonology.org as a way to try to help new users pick up Python, particularly when they needed material to convince management that Python is a good choice. Together with the launch of this partially neglected site, I created a now-inactive mailing list marketing-python. Bold ambitions were announced, but not much happened in the context of "marketing" Python as you might market, say, Java or .NET with a boat load of vigorous hype.

The consensus seemed to be that Python needs a "niche" like those that catapulted Perl and PHP to comparatively wild success. But Python is terrific for many things so it's hard to focus on one or another. With no killer app and no hefty marketing bank roll in sight, we were told that little open source Python could never succeed by herself in the mainstream.

But here we are in 2005 and something curious has happened -- InfoWorld tells us that 14% of all programmers use Python, up 6% from the previous year. This almost doubles the number of Python programmers world-wide. Microsoft and Google are providing two out of three keynotes at the upcoming PyCon conference. Many other big companies are using Python, more and more of them openly on mission critical projects (see for example, Python Success Stories).

So it seems Python is succeeding without any organized marketing effort from the community. Does this mean it has a niche after all? I think it does and it's really quite simple: In a world where more and more companies want to avoid proprietary traps, Python is the solution they are turning to. Python represents the only really viable, robust, scalable, and mature open source alternative to broad-based proprietary technologies like C# or Java. In fact, Python is a heck of a lot better than either of these heavy-weights, in some areas where its standard libraries and third party modules really shine (or theirs really suck). For examples, see this overview.

If I'm right, I and my fellow dysfunctional marketeers can rest at last and enjoy the ride, because the push for technological freedom is - especially outside of the USA - a largely unstoppable force. And Python is, I can say with confidence, quite ready for the crush.