Blog - /Tech
Delving further into what makes Python difficult for me to debug, I think part of the problem might be the backtraces. Emacs Lisp and Perl backtraces display the affected functions and files from the inside out, while Python takes the unnatural step of reversing the order.
Another specific problem that I have with some Python programs is the sheer number of small classes that they are composed of, often with many classes per file. Better is to have one class per file, with that class having more than just 3 or 4 methods. If it has less, you are abstracting too much! (Aside: This is not to say that Java gets it right. Hell no. The compiler should not care what you name the file that happens to contain your class.)
As for replacing existing programs: I don't really care what language the program is written in, as long as it works. I enjoy Miro now, but when it was broken in the alpha days for Ubuntu Gutsy, it was a huge pain to try to figure out what was going wrong. Things that I enjoy extending and hacking on, such as blogging software (PyBlosxom), are prime candidates for replacement. In the case of PyBlosxom, I am going to try out ikiwiki. I have even done some initial work on getting Emacs Muse to work as a potential extension for it, so that I can push .muse files to my webserver using git, and have them published automatically once there. I still need to buckle down and write the Perl glue to connect to this Emacs Muse "compiler", though.
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Posted by piyo at Fri May 23 10:32:56 2008
Thanks for mentioning ikiwiki. It and Emacs Muse itself looks pretty interesting. It concerns me that I first look at what the markup language these wiki-like system uses, and it took some effort to figure out what the markup was for ikiwiki. Perhaps I am leaning toward "Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?" after years of BBCode and MoinMoin. Oh goodie, ikiwiki is markup-agnostic capable.Regarding Emacs itself, I was wondering if the remote host editing feature like TRAMP could work for editing wikis? Maybe that doesn't make any sense. I mean something like a /dav:user@host:... transport. Currently I could emulate a browser with something like emacs-w3m, though. Basically what I want is something like org-mode but integrated with a http/s-DAV based server. Or maybe I don't know what I want and I'm rambling? :-)
Posted by MC at Fri May 23 12:51:03 2008
> ...Python takes the unnatural step of reversing the order.Don't forget, everything Python does is blessed as if by <diety of your choice> himself. If the rest of the world does one thing, and Python does another, it's the rest of the world that's unnatural.
Posted by GCU Prosthetic Conscience at Sun Jun 1 13:13:50 2008
It sounds like what you're complaining about is not so much Python the language, as missing the tooling that you're used to in Java. I can understand that --- I'm a longtime Pythonista who has been using Java for the last year or so at work. But for me, the IDE only really serves to reduce the pain of using Java to a bearable level.If someone would write some improvements for Python-mode (maybe using pymacs?) that would let you follow from any line of an exception in the evaluation buffer to the corresponding source line, maybe you'd have an easier time debugging?
Posted by Michael Olson at Sun Jun 1 15:10:57 2008
No no no. I'm not a Java developer by any stretch. I despise Java :^) . A GUI would not really help here.Add a comment