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Ned Batchelder's blog

Ned Batchelder's personal blog.

Your IDE of choiceToday

A recent posting on django-users is entitled Your IDE of choice, simply asking people for their IDE preferences.

These questions sometimes turn into silly flame wars about Emacs vs. vim vs. everything else, but in this case, it's a bunch of people chiming in with their choice, and I find it useful to read through to see what people are using. Often I discover new tools, as I did this time.

• Geany is a new programmer's editor with some project and build features. If the development keeps progressing, it could be useful.
• rope is a Python refactoring library that I had seen before, but it doesn't integrate with an editor I use day-to-day (yet), so I haven't been able to try it. It seems very capable.
• Turns out Komodo Edit, my current workhorse editor, has gone to 5.0, and I didn't even know. I think asking 4.4 if there are any updates should say, "Yes, 5.0!", but it doesn't.
• Dillo is a web browser. People still write browsers from scratch?! It sounds very idealistic ("Our policy is not to work around broken HTML."), but isn't this a hopelessly uphill battle?
• ecb is the Emacs Code Browser, which looks like a clever

Oldest files meme: PSComJanuary 3

James shows his oldest files, a meme he picked up from Doug who got it from Brandon, its creator.

See one of the above posts for details, but the idea is to find the oldest file in your home directory tree, and tell its story.

I found these:

1986-08-20 .\pscom\avl.h
1986-08-20 .\pscom\avl.c

(full files: avl.h and avl.c)

PSCom was a PostScript preprocessor that I wrote while employed at Digital. We wrote a lot of PostScript code, and wanted to be able to use conditional inclusion, macro replacement, and lexical compression (similar to what jsmin does for JavaScript today). PSCom was the result. It's a C program, and I'm amazed to remember the amount of work that went into providing basic features we take for granted now in the Python world, and in any modern programming environment.

avl.c starts like this:

/***    
 ***    avl.c --
 ***    
 ***    The AVL height-balanced tree abstraction.
 ***    

Django special character tagJanuary 1

I like using unusual text characters to decorate my site, for example, my home page uses lots of mid-dots (· ·) and chevrons (» »), as well as other special characters. To keep the HTML source from being cluttered with those inscrutable numeric entities, I wrote this Django tag:

special_ch = {
    '':     '',
    '>>':   '»',    # RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
    '<<':   '&#xab;',    # LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
    '(c)':  '&#xa9;',    # COPYRIGHT SIGN
    'S':    '&#xa7;',    # SECTION SIGN
    '*':    '&#x2022;',  # BULLET
    '.'

Happy 2009January 1

Happy New Year, everyone.

Wishing you love, health, peace and the
happiness of your pursuits
in the coming year.

Structure Synth and SunflowDecember 31 2008

Structure Synth is a simple language for writing recursive scripts that can generate complex structures. Think of it like Processing, but in 3D, although it's technically more of an L-system. Sunflow is a rendering engine that excels at realistic lighting.

Put the two together and you get landmarks from the intersection of Escher and the Matrix:

It all puts me in the mindset of tinkering with the stellated dodecahedron logo on this site...