python a bust?

[John Howard]

I've sent several messages over the last year asking about python -
Who teaches python? Is python losing steam? etc. I have noticed, eg,
the declinng number of books at my local borders. The last time I
visited a borders (last week), there was 1 (sic) book about python on
the shelve compared to dozens on perl & java! On my last inquiry about
who teaching python, I got two, maybe three, responses. I really want
to see python succeed! It's the best language I've seen. I see a lot
on www.python.org about development, but little on usage. I sent a
message to someone on the python site (I forget who - I know, no
excuse) about what I've done done on a site (grades, web application,
web registration, etc). No reponse. Sorry to ramble, but I wanted to
say a lot, but not have to go into a lot of detail.

[Anand Pillai]

It was a generalization, not with any malice :-)
What I meant was that many of their books were "me-toos",
especially the Early Adopter series. I did not do
a blanket bombing of their books. But I will prefer
an O'Reilly nutshell book anyday to a Wrox one.

I am not planning to convince any publishers on the
market of Python books. At least, not yet.

-Anand

Alex Martelli <al*****@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<c%********************@news2.tin.it>...

Anand Pillai wrote:
...

There was a company called Wrox writing P2P (Programmer 2 Programmer)
books on many technical topics. I think it got absorbed by Wiley recently.

They had gone bust, and the brand has been purchased.

Their choice of topics was "Popular" languages and technologies used
by practicing software developers. I never saw a Python book in their
stable.
Of course, again dont start a thread about the technical perfection of
Wrox books, since I know that their style & content cannot be compared
with an O'reilly nutshell book.

You're wrong: some of their books were truly excellent. Short of Don Box's
Addison-Wesley bible, they had the best on COM, and the best in particular
on ATL, the best way to do COM in Visual C++. Of course, many others
(while still technically OK) were "me too"'s in crowded fields.

But as again, I am not talking about
anything regarding
the "greatness" of the language, but just simple arithmetic.

Simple arithmetic tells us Wrox went bust (despite having some excellent
books and a very vast selection). I'm not sure how you plan to use this to
convince other publishers to put out plenty of "me too's" technically decent
but mostly undistinguished books in crowded fields.
Alex

[John Howard]

Let's say some one walked into a book store and glanced at the books
in computers. He might think, "gee look at all the books on java and
perl and hardly any books on python. What is python? And it's not even
in the languages section. No sense in looking at that!" It's a matter
of perception. "Lots of perl and java - that's the way to go." I also
agree that maybe a lot of books on python are not necessary to learn
the langage. Heck, I learned almost all I know (which I admit is not
much) from web tutorials and samples. But I do have questions I cannot
find the answers to when I browse the book store. Eg, how do I do
admin stuff with python? How do I do cgi stuff with python? There are
books on how to do these in perl. Dozens.

py*******@Hotpop.com (Anand Pillai) wrote in message news:<84**************************@posting.google. com>...

In the ideal "techie makes decisions" world this would have
been a good thing. But not in the real world where the Suits
make decisions in corporates.

There might have been thousands of books published in C/C++
language and they have all helped to popularize it in one
or the other way. Contrast, in the python world we have one
Alex Martelli, one Wesley Chun, one David Mertz, really
countable by hand.

There is a limit to how much a single person can evangelize
a language. Questions similar to what the O.P posted arise
from the listeners.

I would prefer to see more books on Python though they all might
be useless from a pure techie point of view. Let us have
a book on Software Projects in python for example. It might not
have the technical superiority of a Martelli book, but more
attempts like that will save the language and help the
eyeball factor, which is so important in practical marketing.

-Anand

af*****@yahoo.co.uk (Asun Friere) wrote in message news:<38**************************@posting.google. com>...

py*******@yahoo.com (John Howard) wrote in message news:<9e**************************@posting.google. com>...

I've sent several messages over the last year asking about python -
Who teaches python? Is python losing steam? etc. I have noticed, eg,
the declinng number of books at my local borders. The last time I
visited a borders (last week), there was 1 (sic) book about python on
the shelve compared to dozens on perl & java!

If you were developing in Java or Perl maybe you would need dozens of
books. But Python is so elegant and intuitive a single one will do.
;)

[Anand Pillai]

Exactly my feelings on this topic :-)

-Anand

py*******@yahoo.com (John Howard) wrote in message news:<9e**************************@posting.google. com>...

Let's say some one walked into a book store and glanced at the books
in computers. He might think, "gee look at all the books on java and
perl and hardly any books on python. What is python? And it's not even
in the languages section. No sense in looking at that!" It's a matter
of perception. "Lots of perl and java - that's the way to go." I also
agree that maybe a lot of books on python are not necessary to learn
the langage. Heck, I learned almost all I know (which I admit is not
much) from web tutorials and samples. But I do have questions I cannot
find the answers to when I browse the book store. Eg, how do I do
admin stuff with python? How do I do cgi stuff with python? There are
books on how to do these in perl. Dozens.

py*******@Hotpop.com (Anand Pillai) wrote in message news:<84**************************@posting.google. com>...

In the ideal "techie makes decisions" world this would have
been a good thing. But not in the real world where the Suits
make decisions in corporates.

There might have been thousands of books published in C/C++
language and they have all helped to popularize it in one
or the other way. Contrast, in the python world we have one
Ale x Martelli, one Wesley Chun, one David Mertz, really countable by hand.

There is a limit to how much a single person can evangelize
a language. Questions similar to what the O.P posted arise
from the listeners.

I would prefer to see more books on Python though they all might
be useless from a pure techie point of view. Let us have
a book on Software Projects in python for example. It might not
have the technical superiority of a Martelli book, but more
attempts like that will save the language and help the
eyeball factor, which is so important in practical marketing.

-Anand

af*****@yahoo.co.uk (Asun Friere) wrote in message news:<38**************************@posting.google. com>...

py*******@yahoo.com (John Howard) wrote in message news:<9e**************************@posting.google. com>...
> I've sent several messages over the last year asking about python -
> Who teaches python? Is python losing steam? etc. I have noticed, eg,
> the declinng number of books at my local borders. The last time I
> visited a borders (last week), there was 1 (sic) book about python on
> the shelve compared to dozens on perl & java!
If you were developing in Java or Perl maybe you would need dozens of
books. But Python is so elegant and intuitive a single one will do.
;)

[JD]

What is the best way to debug a Python program if when i run it, it
totally hangs up the
terminal console.

Control-c or control-d has NO effect, so it's hung up somewhere, but
we have no idea
where.

We are using Python 2.3, on an openBSD box, running the python script
from the shell.

Is it possible to somehow find out what is making it hang up?

[Skip Montanaro]

JD> What is the best way to debug a Python program if when i run it, it
JD> totally hangs up the terminal console.

JD> Control-c or control-d has NO effect, so it's hung up somewhere, but
JD> we have no idea where.

Does it use X? If so, try setting your DISPLAY to another box. (Maybe it's
hanging the X server.) If not, try ssh'ing into the box from another
machine. Can you run top in another window while it runs? Perhaps it's
chewing up gobs of memory (got any monster range() calls in there)?

If you give us some more details about how you think it's supposed to
interact with the system we might be able to provide some more debugging
clues.

Skip

[Donn Cave]

Quoth JD <li***@webcrunchers.com>:
....
| Control-c or control-d has NO effect, so it's hung up somewhere, but
| we have no idea
| where.

One way to look at it might be ktrace. Somewhere in there, you're
stuck in one of those damned kernel mediated services like NFS, and
some ioctl to the offending device will be the last syscall reported
for the process. lsof might be good enough.

Donn Cave, do**@drizzle.com

[Bengt Richter]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:07:31 -0800, JD <li***@webcrunchers.com> wrote:

What is the best way to debug a Python program if when i run it, it
totally hangs up the
terminal console.

Control-c or control-d has NO effect, so it's hung up somewhere, but
we have no idea
where.

We are using Python 2.3, on an openBSD box, running the python script
from the shell.

Is it possible to somehow find out what is making it hang up?

have you tried gdb python and then run with your_python_prog.py as the arg?
If gdb will catch a ctl-c then you might be able to use bt to get a backtrace?
(I don't really know much about gdb, but someone here has probably done this
and can tell you the right way to do it ;-)

Of course, there's the lions-in-africa thing of putting print statements to
narrow down successively the area where it could be hanging ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter

[Michael Hudson]

JD <li***@webcrunchers.com> writes:

What is the best way to debug a Python program if when i run it, it
totally hangs up the
terminal console.

Control-c or control-d has NO effect, so it's hung up somewhere, but
we have no idea
where.

We are using Python 2.3, on an openBSD box, running the python
script from the shell.

"gdb -p"?

Cheers,
mwh

--
Q: Isn't it okay to just read Slashdot for the links?
A: No. Reading Slashdot for the links is like having "just one hit"
off the crack pipe.
-- http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/k...shdot.html#faq