GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Friday 11 October 2002

Programming Language Humor

Michael Vanier wrote an excellent update of the Programming Languages as Cars metaphors. I added a comment to the Lambda discussion about it.

And burningbird wrote a wonderful parable about Programming Languages that everyone has linked to by now.
12:45:39 AM comment/

Python 2.3 Plan Summary

Plans are starting to solidify, for the next version of Python, Python 2.3, scheduled to be released some time in late 2002 or early 2003.

The PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) about the 2.3 plan is here: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0283.html

(Jeffrey "Industrie Toulouse" Shell pointed out this PEP, at http://radio.weblogs.com/0106123/2002/10/08.html#a215 )

To turn this entry into my own mini-pointer about the PEPs, I'll add that http://www.python.org/peps/ is the URL for PEP 0, which is an index of all of the PEPs, and that http://www.python.org/doc/essays/pepparade.html is where Guido, the BDFL, comments about the ones that he has read. Seems like they somehow could have worked Sergeant PEPper into this, somewhere.

BTW, good turnout for this past Wednesday's BayPIGgies meeting. Wesley summarized some of the Python-related talks from the O'Reilly OSCon.
12:39:55 AM comment/

Nuking lit carbon yields plasmoids

Happened upon the page of microwave experiment suggestions a couple of days ago. I had to add this comment:

Nuke a LIT cigarette
I — er, um, an acquaintance — tried this in college many many years ago (around 1970). You get a free-floating plasmoid. It was the late 1990's before I finally found this explanation of the phonomenon (see http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/oa_plasmoid.htm for safer ways to do this experiment) but the details were unmistakable. The buzzing, the ball-lightning-like effect. Very cool. I — um, my acquantance — just used a plastic spoon, burned a hole in it (with the cigarette, of course) and then jammed the filter in so that the spoon helped the cigarette stand up vertically. You may want to be sure to use a microwave that doesn't spin the "food" around.

Hmm, I don't have a "science" category so I'll just have to call it "humor" :-)
12:26:24 AM comment/