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Ted Leung on the Air

Open Source, Modern Programming Languages, OS X, Photography, and ...

Retry: Dynamic Languages for Desktop AppsYesterday

Apparently, I wasn’t very clear in my previous post, because almost all of the commenters seem to think that I was talking about using a dynamic language to script parts of a desktop application. That’s not at all what I mean. I think that it will be a success point when a dynamic language (I don’t care which one) is used to write a substantial portion of a desktop application that enjoys reasonably widespread success/distribution. I used Lightroom as my example because that’s the kind of application that is the target. While 63% of the code written by the Lightroom team is in Lua, only around 40% of all the code in the application is written in Lua. I am looking for a much higher percentage. I don’t have quibble with Lightroom’s percentages, because it’s very sensible for Adobe to reuse their C/C++ code for RAW processing etc, and there’s no commercial justification for even trying to rewrite that code in Lua.

We already know that dynamic language interpreters can be embedded in applications. That’s been happening for years and years. But since we are starting to see progress in the performance of dynamic language runtimes, it should be possible to write really good desktop applications using them.

Lua in LightroomOctober 9

One of the points that I discussed in my PyConUK keynote was the role (or lack thereof) of dynamic languages in desktop software development. I know that some people believe that desktop software is dead, but I am not one of them. I think that the nature of desktop software is changing, but that it is still relevant. In my discussion of dynamic languages and desktop software, I used the example of Adobe’s Lightroom, as the best example of commercial software that is written in a dynamic language. Lightroom is written in Lua, and according to this presentation by Troy Gaul, 63% of the code written by the Lightroom team is Lua (there is a bunch of C code for the low level image processing code, which is shared with Adobe Camera Raw). A number of people at PyConUK had no idea of the role of Lua in Lightroom, which is unsurprising. The only reason that I knew was that I was following Lightroom as a photography nut, and the information flew by on some boards. Troy’s presentation is pretty illuminating, so if you are interested in dynamic languages in desktop applications, you should watch the whole thing.

The First Annual JVM Language SummitSeptember 27

You know that a conference is good when you go home with a list of stuff that you never heard of but now need to go follow up on. The JVM Language Summit was exceptional in this regard. Sun provided a location and a few of the speakers, but most of the speakers at the Summit were not Sun employees, although there were a few Sun alumni amongst the speaker ranks. The topics that were discusssed went all the way from type theory (including the usual greekified type proofs), typical language design stuff, VM design, all the way down to discussions of how high allocation rates can cause hot data to get flushed out of caches on the bare metal. Slides for all the talks are available on the wiki for the conference, and some of the talks will have video at either InfoQ or YouTube. Here are some of my favorites from the three days.

Clojure

I’d been aware of Clojure prior to the summit and had looked at the page on Clojure’s use of persistent data structures, so I thought that I had some idea of what was interesting about Clojure. I was wrong. Rich Hickey’s 30 minute presentation on Clojure had a really large amount of information per unit time. By the end of the time I was really interested in Clojure, and I was able to find out a bit more about it by going to an open space session and by being a

Book Review: Learning Website Development with DjangoSeptember 19

The folks at Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Learning Website Development with Django by Ayman Hourieh. It’s a fairly thin book, weighing in at just 243 pages, but it it is a very good introduction to Django. Knowledge of Python is assumed, so if you need that information, you’ll need another book. Hourieh uses a running example, a social bookmarking application, throughout the book. This means that he is adding features to the application in each chapter, which is a style that I like because it shows how to use Django to build up a decently featured application piece by piece. There is lots of code, which I found easy to read, except for some places where the bold facing of new code was somehow omitted.

The only problem with the book was that it was finished before Django went 1.0, so there are undoubtedly some places where things are not quite in sync with Django 1.0. Hourieh did make an effort to deal with some of the largest 1.0 changes, like newforms, but omitted other like Unicode support. This is inevitable when the book and software are not in sync, but since Django only went 1.0 a few weeks ago, the only documentation that is completely up to date is the official Django documentation itself.

If you kno

PyConUK 2008September 18

I am slowly recovering from the transatlantic flights for PyCon UK, so I think that I’m ready to give a report.

The conference

In Europe, at least, the Python community seems to be sprouting more regional conferences as opposed to having the single EuroPython conference. This probably makes it easier for people to get to a conference, but it also means that people like me have to travel more in order to attend all these meetings. PyCon UK, also takes place over a weekend, again to facilitate people being able to attend without the hassle of getting time off from work and so forth. The conference was roughly the size of EuroPython, with attendance in the 230-250 range.

As usual, I did some of the regular program and some hallway track. The top three talks that I went to were Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s update on the new stuff in Django 1.0 (that’s Jacob in the picture above). Chris Withers did a good talk on the problems with Python package management. The basic answer there is that a lot of stuff layered on top of a shaky foundation, in this case, distutils. Chris discussed some (partial, in my opinion) solutions to the problems, the