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For some reason I find it highly improbable that I’m the only one to ever experience this breakage with the Bazaar VCS: $ bzr Traceback (most recent call last): File “/opt/local/bin/bzr”, line 76, in ? import bzrlib.breakin ImportError: No module named breakin I installed it from MacPorts a long time ago and ran into this [...]

If Python 3.0 ships before Perl 6, I’m going to cry. John Gruber, Daring Fireball Of course it will. And I’m going to laugh. Heartily.

My favorite programming language, JavaScript, is quite possibly one of the worst named. It really has nothing to do with Java. I promise. Now that the ECMA is working on the next version, code named ES4, JavaScript needs a new brand. Steve Yegge agrees. So what makes a good brand? Well I’m no branding specialist, [...]

How would you get the current user’s name in your programming language of choice? Furthermore, how does this exercise reflect on the design of that language? C# string user = Environment.UserName; Perl my $user = getpwuid($<); PHP $user = $_ENV['user']; Python import os user = os.environ['USER'] Ruby user = ENV['USER'] Now that I’ve iterated through [...]

Sometimes when I write an article I know that there is a low potential value for comments directly on the article. In these cases, I close comments and encourage linking to the article from other sites, hoping to encourage more thoughtful replies and a richer discourse. Well that’s great, but it’s not much of a [...]

Does anyone else find it strangely unsettling that Guido van Rossum’s blog runs on Java? Presumably, at least: the URL has .jsp in it. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=212259 It’s not the end of the world or anything, but I think eyebrows go up when the CEO of Ford drives a Toyota or the BDFL of Python publishes his [...]

Recently I used Fog Creek’s Copilot software to attempt to help a family member import some favorites into Firefox. I followed the original Project Aardvark team two summers ago and knew what Copilot was in broad strokes. So I ran the two minute trial and things seemed to work as expected. I bought a day [...]

I really like Ruby’s idiomatic use of ? and ! token characters at the end of method names to indicate the method’s purpose: a predicate or a mutator (or otherwise destructive method), respectively. The benefits can be seen with examples. If the task is replacing a substring inside of a larger string, JavaScript would have [...]

Usually I don’t do roundup type posts, but there has been a lot of awesome recently and I felt it was prudent to catalog some of it. Review Board A Django-based web app for managing code reviews. I have yet to try it, but it looks awesome. I’m going to see if I can work [...]

I do a lot of developing for the web, which makes sense seeing as though I’m a web developer. If I were developing with my ideal set of tools, the following things would be in that set: Serving FreeBSD 6 or Mac OS X Server lighttpd — serving static files and running a reverse proxy [...]