wxForty-Two

The wxPython community now has a 2nd book about our favorite UI toolkit. The book is "wxPython 2.8 Application Development Cookbook" written by Cody Precord and published by Packt Publishing. Cody is the creator of the awesome Editra source code editor and a frequent participant on the wxPython-users mail list. There is an eBook version of the text available from Packt Publishing, and you can get the printed version from Packt or from other booksellers such as amazon.com.

I haven't read all the recipes yet, but from what I've seen so far I can say that they are informative and do a good job of explaining the demonstrated techniques and the concepts used or implemented in the sample source code.  I think that there will be something for everyone in this book, from newbies all the way up to experienced users.

Congrats Cody!

A number of people have asked me about it and so I finally decided that it is high time that I give the whole twitter thing a try.  Of course I've gotten into it late enough that my usual user name, RobinD is already taken, although that page returns an error.  (I suspect that somebody got their account suspended...)  Strangely enough somebody has already registered the wxPython name, although they haven't tweeted anything since last July...  Anyway, if you'd like to follow me or send me messages on twitter I am known there as RobinD42. Bear with me while I take my first steps in this new environment...

I found out last week at the OSCON conference that my software is being used at the South Pole by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory project currently being constructed about a kilometer from the Pole.  They are using wxPython for the controller user interface of the machine that is drilling holes 2.4 kilometers down into the ice.  There isn't anything on their website about that piece of software, but it's real interesting anyway   Here is a bit more about the drill.  There are also these pictures, videos and blog from one of the scientists that gave the presentation I attended where he shows a bit about what life at the Pole is like.  (Where a nice warm summer's day might get up to -31F. Brr!!)

This news means that I now have reports of wxPython being used from every continent on this planet. Yay!

I saw this sentence today on ArsTechnica:

"...Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous."

I think that sentence could win an award if there was a most-big-words-used-where-small-words-would-do-fine contest. Good thing that my dictionary is only a Spotlight search away... [type][type][type]... Ah so that's what it means. Yes, I agree. <wink!>

Last week on wxPython-users a user wrote about a particular GUI class and said that, "it looks really awful." Trying to get more details from the person about what is so bad about it only resulted in some confusion because he seems to really like the class and listed some nice features when asked, "in what way is it awful?" Well, as you can probably guess, it turns out that English is not his native language and he intended to say that the GUI class in question filled him with awe, or in other words, that it is "really awesome."

This got me to thinking about something that has probably crossed every computer scientist's mind at one time or another: It's too bad that our spoken and written word can't be passed through something like a syntax check, preprocessor, lint, or a compiler. Just think how many problems could be caught before the communications arrived at the listener's auditory or visual interface! If we could communicate person to person using something that is as clean and as structured as a programming language like Python then I think that there would be a lot less confusion in the world. If our spoken word would fail to compile if it is incorrectly spoken, and if it failed to run if the assumptions it was built upon were incorrect, or were not fully specified then when what is spoken does successfully execute then there would be a much higher level of comprehension at the receiving end, and a high level of trust that what was received was exactly what was intended to be said. Using a structured communication mechanism like a programming language would also allow for clear and unambiguous responses or acknowledgments that what was said was received by the listener, and understood.

There would still be bugs of course, since nobody is perfect. But I expect that if you look at the number of times that what you speak or write is misunderstood or misinterpreted, or even just ignored, and compare that to the number of bugs in your software that have made it out to the customers, then I think that for almost all of us there would be a huge difference in those numbers. So what do you think, can Python 4000 be a spoken language?