Python is the easiest language in which to do interesting things

By Michael Foord -
Larry O'Brien is a .NET blogger who is a fan of IronPython and Resolver One. Larry is also a writer for the SD Times technology website. One of his recent articles is on Python, IronPython and Resolver One (amongst other things). It starts well: "Python is the easiest language in which to do interesting things".
As a .NET developer he naturally goes onto talk about IronPython and then discusses IronPython in Action.
For fellow dilettante Python programmers, I recommend the book “IronPython in Action” by Michael Foord and Christian Muirhead. Soon to be published by Manning (I reviewed a preprint), the book is particularly strong in providing simple-but-not-simplistic illustrations and tables that clarify behind-the-scenes structural elements. Visual Studio screenshots may be a little more common than I’d like, but for those new to the VS environment, these may be welcome.

The cheek, there's maybe four or five screenshots of Visual Studio in total - making it one every hundred pages or so! They're mainly showing the IronPython integration and the designers, but if that is his worst criticism of the book then we've not done too badly. Anyway, he continues:

A common challenge for books involving technologies ported to new environments is balancing viewpoints. A strength of the Foord/Muirhead book is just such a balance, providing “Pythonic” topics such as test-driven development, mocks and metaprogramming, along with clear discussions of .NET’s CLR structure, Windows Presentation Foundation, and even programming PowerShell with Python.

Larry is also a fan of Resolver One, the Python powered spreadsheet created by Resolver Systems. I've been working with Resolver Systems for nearly three years, and it is how I got involved in IronPython, so it's nice to hear people say good things about it:

I can’t praise enough the combination of spreadsheet and programming models embodied in Resolver One: I truly believe that this is one of the best ways to do exploratory programming. Although it’s been 15 years since I’ve worked with fuzzy logic, I was able to put together the not-entirely-rudimentary building blocks of a fuzzy manifold editor (a tool for visualizing the response curve of a fuzzy system) in a matter of hours.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Extending Abobe Flash Player and AIR with Python and Ruby

By Michael Foord -
An intriguing blog entry about an Adobe experimental project. It is a C/C++ cross- compiler for the flash player and AIR. This means that you can (will be able to?) cross-compile the Python / Ruby/ lots of other language runtimes and then run them in Flash. The blog entry contrasts this approach to the DLR which requires the re-implementation of dynamic languages - hence IronPython and IronRuby. The project is already beyond proof-of concept, they even have Quake III cross-compiled and running in Flash. Extending Adobe Flash Player and AIR with C/C++ Cross-Compiler Quake 3 has already been ported to managed code , but this is even more impressive. Whether the Python interpreter can be cross-compiled to run on top of another runtime (with completely different basic types), without changing the language semantics at all, has yet to be proved - but it is a very interesting project. (It also means that Python/Ruby will possibly be enabled only by additional optional downloads - but don...
Read more

IronPython Tools for Visual Studio CTP3

By Michael Foord -
At PyCon this year Dino Veihland announced IronPython Tools for Visual Studio, an extension to Visual Studio 2010 for working with IronPython. It features Python syntax highlighting, awesome auto-complete (intellisense) and a host of other features for working with IronPython code in Visual Studio. It can be used with the free Visual Studio shell and doesn't require you to own a full copy of Visual Studio. The third CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been made available for download. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio We are happy to announce a minor update to the IronPython Tools for Visual Studio.  IronPython Tools for Visual Studio (IPyTools) is a set of extensions available for Visual Studio 2010 which supports development of IronPython applications.  This release is our 3rd Community Technical Preview (CTP) and builds upon the previous two releases.  The release is a minor update which includes bug fixes and a number of small features.  You can download...
Read more

Further Adventures of the Debugger

By Michael Foord -
Harry Pierson (Microsoft IronPython PM) has been experimenting with writing an IronPython debugger ( ipydbg ) on top of the .NET MDbg APIs. When we last left him , he had implemented Just My Code (JMC) support allowing you to step into IronPython code. Since then he has made a lot of progress including a colourful REPL (interactive console) and solving some difficult problems around getting to real values behind boxed IronPython variables (needed for showing local variables). He has blogged extensively on what he has been up to (more recent posts last): Showing Source Code Colorful Console IronPython ConsoleColorMgr (the colorful console code pulled out into a separate IronPython module) A Little Hack...err...Cleanup Getting Local Variables Displaying Values Command Routing Getting Arguments REPL Console A lot of functionality is now present. In the command routing entry Harry outlines the seven commands supported by the debugger so far: Continue, Quit, Show Stack Trace, Show Locals, ...
Read more