Last night's PySIG

[Ted Roche]

Thanks to the six attendees who made it to the special "Decorators and
Cookies" meetings of the Python Special Interest Group. Special thanks
to Bill Sconce for the delicious cookies, and to Alex Hewitt for
supplying wireless and wired connectivity and to Bruce Dawson for
supplying the projector.

Bill provided two handouts (Bill, can we post them to PySIG?) and a
spirited discussion of the attrgetter() function within sorted() to
provide a cleaner substitute for a lambda function. We looked at a  
few of
the gotchas of sort() in place vs. sorted() returning a result, what
happens when you fail to supply a key for sorting, and so forth.

Discussion was far-ranging, including the logic of interning immutable
objects, the magic None object and the meaning of Null.

Also mentioned was Python's #8 standing in the Tiobe list:

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

And a couple of interesting documents from Clay Shirky:

"Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software"
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html

and:
"Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags"
text: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
audio: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html

Plans are still afoot for a lab early next year. Stay tuned!

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com