Industrie Toulouse

	Tuesday, October 8, 2002

Looking ahead to Python 2.3
I was trying to ascertain the state of Python 2.3 today, and PEP 283 offered up an interesting list of what is already in for 2.3, and a fairly long list of "planned features". What's in? Two new types - booleans and sets!. A fundamental datetime type or interface may make the release as well. A planned possible feature is an Iterator Tools module featuring "goodies from SML and Haskell".

I've been using Python for over six years now (it's hard to believe it's been that long!), and it's been interesting to watch the language grow since 1.3. A nice thing about Python's growth is that it's been fairly smart - as it picks up new features, it also simplifies itself. A lot of the old confusions / problems are gone or going away, and helpful features have popped up -- the type/class dichotomy is on its way out (it's interesting to see the prototype 'bool' type written up in Python by subclassing from 'int' - see PEP 285); booleans are coming in (I've always liked the way Python has treated true/false values, but it's nice to have actual 'True' and 'False' objects, and the built in 'bool' constructor); much of the old 'string' module has become methods on the 'string' type, removing the oddities of having a bunch of procedures to operate on a very common object in an object-oriented language; there are more unifications in expressions (the 'in' operator can now be used to search for substrings in a string: if 'this' in 'there was this thing..': in place of if 'there was this thing..'.find('this') > -1:; this also applies for dictionary keys: 'somekey' in mydict in place of mydict.has_key('somekey')); iterators are offered throughout the language now, sometimes offering shortcuts for common operations (such as reading individual lines from a file), and keeping resource use down for others; and we finally have nested scopes. Not to mention the little delights like Generators and List Comprehensions.

12:26:29 PM blips[]

On .Mac, part 1.3 - availability wrap up
Without going into too much details, tonight after mad birthday celebrations (where I spent too much time being tired drunk instead of too-much-dancing drunk), I came home to an email from Apple concerning the .Mac outages. Their claim, which I believe, is that there have been equipment problems. They claim the vendor has not been able to promise no more problems in the future, and work is underway to install new equipment.

Hopefully this works out well for them and for us subscribers, and it's nice to be notified. In the past, when the service was free, I didn't mind outages and interruptions, but as web services get integrated more and more into desktop applications and environments, service availability is going to be a critical issue. Hopefully having paying subscribers will offset the high cost of service availability. Large scale web services like .Mac, whatever Microsoft .NET My Services morphs into, and other large offerings require more than just a single web server sitting in California. Backup, caching, and location issues abound for service providers. Even Userland's Radio servers have had problems in the past (but have run smoothly now for months). Other services, like LiveJournal have also had availability issues, and in fact LiveJournal is closed to free accounts that don't come in off of a referral.

There are some other weblogs about Web Service Strategies that have better details than I can offer about the aspects of web services beyond SOAP, REST, or however the basic protocal is spelled for you.
1:53:01 AM blips[]

Navigation

Subscriptions