The fact that programming is still as much an art, and a black art at that, as it is a craft makes it cry out for a muse. I nominate Polyhymnia to this sacred task: who better than the muse of the Pythagorean mystics and geometers to chivvy and inspire the wizards and gurus of such languages Python, Perl, Eiffel and Scheme?
When the muse inspires me, what I mostly program in is Python
now, having undergone a not-so-brief flirtation with Perl. The more I use Python, the more I prefer Python to any other language I've tried. For certain things that Perl does well (primarily manipulating text files by means of regular expressions), I know of nothing better, but when it comes to building and maintaining complex programs, Python beats it all hollow. Many people who program in Perl all day long admit
that they can still have trouble reading and understanding their own code written six months before, let alone code written by someone else, and the rest are fibbing. For someone who wants to work on programs in the odd spare moments of a busy schedule, Perl's slogan "There's More Than One Way To Do It." begins to sound more like a threat than a promise. Although there may be more than one way to do it in Python, there's usually one obvious way, and then some tricksy others, and the obvious way usually works.
The Technical books section of this site needs to be rebuilt with my new amazon.com identity. Here you'll find my absolute favorite books for any programmer's reference library (provided that they're available from Amazon, anyway).
My extracurricular projects are pretty much on hiatus at the moment. I'm the maintainer of Moop, a Pythonic MOO that nobody uses (nobody used it even before I became the maintainer, but at least I managed to set it up as a SourceForge project so that it wasn't abandoned completely. Someday somebody may do something interesting with the code. I'm also the developer and maintainer of Rollem, a table-rolling program for RPGs. Again, nobody except me seems to use it, but at least here I have some plans for it: I'm thinking of rewriting the graphical interface (currently using Tkinter) with wxPython, as a means of learning wxPython, and because wxPython makes for spiffier, snappier interfaces anyway. I'm also thinking of advertising its existence a little more by making some prebuilt tables available as web utilities on this site. The difficulty with that is that I think my host provider is still using an ancient version of Python (1.5.2 maybe), which means that I can't take advantage of much of the newer stuff in Python, particularly improvements in the XML libraries, which is too bad since the tables are XML.
| Previous Muse | Up To Muses | Next Muse |