Project dream

[Will Stuyvesant]

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

I can think of:

- A civilization like game in Python, with multiplayer support via
twisted.

- An easy to use tool for drawing diagrams, typically various kinds of
arrows and circles and boxes, that produces nice .eps and .svg files.

- A roguelike in Python. Since there is still no portable curses, it
needs WConio or something like that, and also multiplayer would be
great.

- Something for weblogging and todo things, probably via CGI.

What would your favorite be?

[Andrew Dalke]

Will Stuyvesant:

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?
An integrated chemical/bioinformatics development and
exploration environment. Got a few million dollars to fund me?
(Actually, more like 10 million, but bootstrappable with only
a few million.)

:)
- A civilization like game in Python, with multiplayer support via
twisted.
There's been a few civ clones -- I recall playing one in the
mid-90s for Python using CLIPS for the AI. Don't recall the
name now. There's also openciv (in Python, nearly complete,
no longer active) or freeciv (in C, active). What would the
advantage be to writing yet another clone?
- An easy to use tool for drawing diagrams, typically various kinds of
arrows and circles and boxes, that produces nice .eps and .svg files.
What about Sketch?
http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
- A roguelike in Python. Since there is still no portable curses, it
needs WConio or something like that, and also multiplayer would be
great.
Why does that need to be rewritten in Python? As I understand
it, the C version is very portable and may simply need just bindings
for Python.
- Something for weblogging and todo things, probably via CGI.
Aren't there a few dozen of those already? Falls into the category
of easy to write but without one clear way to do it. So there are
a lot of different implementations, all different, all focused on solving
the given author's needs.
What would your favorite be?

More important, what would *your* favorite be. It looks like
you want to do a project but don't know which one to focus on.
My answer then is to do any of these projects; they are all great
ones to learn how to do larger, more useful projects.

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

[Ray Smith]

Will Stuyvesant wrote:

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?
[snip]
What would your favorite be?

I'd like to develop some business type of app, eg:

* like a personal accounting system,

* followed by commercial accounting,

* POS,

Python still "seems" to lack "mature" business applications.

Regards,

Ray Smith

[Rene Pijlman]

Will Stuyvesant:

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

I was thinking of an open source personal information management
application, to store notes, knowledge, hyperlinks, snippets, documents
and such in one flexible integrated information structure. All the things
that now end up in unrelated documents in different folder hierarchies.

Something with the flexibility and visualisation of the Brain
(www.thebrain.com), the structuring capabilities of InfoHandler
(www.mdesoft.com/english.htm) and a Googleish search engine.

--
René Pijlman

[Aahz]

In article <kp********************************@4ax.com>,
Rene Pijlman <re********************@my.address.is.invalid> wrote:

I was thinking of an open source personal information management
application, to store notes, knowledge, hyperlinks, snippets, documents
and such in one flexible integrated information structure. All the things
that now end up in unrelated documents in different folder hierarchies.

Something with the flexibility and visualisation of the Brain
(www.thebrain.com), the structuring capabilities of InfoHandler
(www.mdesoft.com/english.htm) and a Googleish search engine.

You mean something like Chandler?
http://osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_Vision.htm
--
Aahz (aa**@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote
programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

[Irmen de Jong]

Will Stuyvesant wrote:

- A roguelike in Python. Since there is still no portable curses, it
needs WConio or something like that, and also multiplayer would be
great.

While not written *in* Python, it's scriptable with Python:
http://www.thangorodrim.net/pangband.html (PAngband).

waaay back someone even created an Amiga version of this
game based upon Amiga Angband and my AmigaPython port :)

--Irmen

[Brandon J. Van Every]

"Will Stuyvesant" <hw***@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:cb**************************@posting.google.c om...

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

I can think of:

- A civilization like game in Python, with multiplayer support via
twisted.
Will, are you aware that I'm beginning exactly this project? Well, not the
twisted bit, I don't even know what that is or why one would want it.
Please see my post "ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python." I'd be interested
in your feedback even if my project goals don't match yours.
- A roguelike in Python. Since there is still no portable curses, it
needs WConio or something like that, and also multiplayer would be
great.

There's Umbra. http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Umbra/ Graphics and
gameplay aren't great, but it is something to start with.

If you go to http://www.thangorodrim.net/ and search with the keyword
"Python," you will find some roguelikes that claim to have various amounts
of Python support in them. I haven't chased any of these down myself
though. At some point I gave up on the "do a RPG" project excuse, opting
instead for 4X TBS because it's more directly applicable to my Ocean Mars
project.

--
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.

[Rene Pijlman]

Aahz:

You mean something like Chandler?
http://osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_Vision.htm

Yes, that's what I meant. Although Chandler seems much more ambitious.
Very interesting project.

--
René Pijlman

[Paul Rubin]

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:

What would your favorite be?

A CVS-like system for email. You'd receive all your messages on a
server somewhere. You'd then be able to connect your laptop to the
internet, download ("check out") your mail, and read and reply to it
offline (not necessarily all of it). When you dial up again, the
replies get sent out and stored ("checked in") on the server, the
messages that you read get marked as read, the ones you didn't read
don't get marked, etc. The CVS-like aspect is that you can do the
same thing from your office computer, your friend's computer, etc., so
you have the same messages checked out on multiple clients at the same
time. The server automatically merges the "change sets" when you
check any in. Finally, the server shouldn't need any special protocol
to check messages in or out. It should be able to create a single
tarball or zipfile that you download, and accept a single tarball or
zipfile when you upload

I've been wanting for a while to write something like this. Everyone
I've mentioned it to wants to use it. I'm amazed it doesn't exist
already, at least in any well-known form.

[Mark Carter]

> I was thinking of an open source personal information management

application, to store notes, knowledge, hyperlinks, snippets, documents
and such in one flexible integrated information structure. All the things
that now end up in unrelated documents in different folder hierarchies.

Something with the flexibility and visualisation of the Brain

Well, it doesn't have the flexibility of the brain, but you could take
a look at Leo (Literate Editor for Outlines):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/

[Ville Vainio]

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

Well, not completely *in* python, but about Python anyway:

- Rewrite Emacs (though this would probably need lots of C code for
that extra snappiness). Make it extensible in Python (natively,
i.e. w/o pymacs), use all the latest Gtk UI stuff, provide all the
intellisense:ish features of commercial IDEs (yes, I know about
Semantic).

- Port Python to Symbian OS > 6.0

- Implement fast native code compilation for Python (though this is
well beyond my capabilities). This might be interesting also in the
sense of creating a compiler in Python, even though it might not be
that fast...

--
Ville Vainio http://www.students.tut.fi/~vainio24

[Ville Vainio]

Paul Rubin <http://ph****@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

What would your favorite be?
A CVS-like system for email. You'd receive all your messages on a

[..]

This sounded quite fascinating. It also sounded quite doable w/
Subversion, w/ its "Properties" (metadata) and Python API.
check any in. Finally, the server shouldn't need any special protocol
to check messages in or out. It should be able to create a single
tarball or zipfile that you download, and accept a single tarball or
zipfile when you upload

No biggie, but it might still be useful for the system to be 100%
accessible from a normal Subversion client.

OT: Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org) is finally going to hit
Beta and 1.0 Real Soon Now (tm). I read that it might be even during
this year, but that's probably not going to happen.

--
Ville Vainio http://www.students.tut.fi/~vainio24

[Will Stuyvesant]

> [Andrew Dalke"]

An integrated chemical/bioinformatics development and
exploration environment. Got a few million dollars to fund me?
(Actually, more like 10 million, but bootstrappable with only
a few million.)

:)
I guess all that money is needed for getting high quality people into
it? Or other reasons? What techniques would you use?

- A civilization like game in Python, with multiplayer support via
twisted.

There's been a few civ clones -- I recall playing one in the
mid-90s for Python using CLIPS for the AI. Don't recall the
name now. There's also openciv (in Python, nearly complete,
no longer active) or freeciv (in C, active). What would the
advantage be to writing yet another clone?

Getting one to 1.0, to *finish* one, to a stable version that is at
least as good as the original civ outofthebox. I don't think the C
based versions will finish, C is rather too low level to my taste.
Maybe Python can do it. I *know* it can, but for it to happen is
another thing.

- An easy to use tool for drawing diagrams, typically various kinds of
arrows and circles and boxes, that produces nice .eps and .svg files.

What about Sketch?
http://sketch.sourceforge.net/

I was not aware of Sketch, thanks for the link. But it has to wait
until I have broadband again: needs GTK, GTK+, libart, etc. I am on
Windows and downloads are slow now.

- A roguelike in Python. Since there is still no portable curses, it
needs WConio or something like that, and also multiplayer would be
great.

Why does that need to be rewritten in Python? As I understand
it, the C version is very portable and may simply need just bindings
for Python.

It is, but I would like to program it. Design an AI, called Borg in
roguelikes. And I can not do C bindings (too long ago I did C).
Besides I don't *want* to C again :-)

- Something for weblogging and todo things, probably via CGI.

Aren't there a few dozen of those already? Falls into the category
of easy to write but without one clear way to do it. So there are
a lot of different implementations, all different, all focused on solving
the given author's needs.

Python can be used here to *find* the way to do it, because it is easy
to start all over from scratch. But so far I have not found a good
path.

What would your favorite be?

More important, what would *your* favorite be. It looks like
you want to do a project but don't know which one to focus on.
My answer then is to do any of these projects; they are all great
ones to learn how to do larger, more useful projects.

Um, more useful? Can you give some more examples of what you think
useful?
I am looking for a fun project and inspiration and maybe even fun
people who join a project, you got that right :-)

[Michael Hudson]

Paul Rubin <http://ph****@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:

What would your favorite be?
A CVS-like system for email. You'd receive all your messages on a
server somewhere. You'd then be able to connect your laptop to the
internet, download ("check out") your mail, and read and reply to it
offline (not necessarily all of it). When you dial up again, the
replies get sent out and stored ("checked in") on the server, the
messages that you read get marked as read, the ones you didn't read
don't get marked, etc. The CVS-like aspect is that you can do the
same thing from your office computer, your friend's computer, etc., so
you have the same messages checked out on multiple clients at the same
time.

Up to here, this sounds like the idealized IMAP experience. Using
Apple's mail.app offline isn't so different from this -- there are
some bogosities in the implementation (in Jaguar), but the intent is
clearly there.
The server automatically merges the "change sets" when you check any
in. Finally, the server shouldn't need any special protocol to
check messages in or out. It should be able to create a single
tarball or zipfile that you download, and accept a single tarball or
zipfile when you upload

Mail.app can import from most formats and will upload on sync... of
course, I like to have my mail on a machine where I have a shell too,
which makes all this a little bit trival (it also means that when I'm
online -- as now -- I use ssh + screen to acheive something a litle
bit like what you describe).

Cheers,
mwh

--
It's an especially annoying American buzzword for "business use,
as opposed to consumer, research, or educational use".
-- Tim Peters defines "enterprise"

[Will Stuyvesant]

> [Irmen de Jong]

While not written *in* Python, it's scriptable with Python:
http://www.thangorodrim.net/pangband.html (PAngband).

waaay back someone even created an Amiga version of this
game based upon Amiga Angband and my AmigaPython port :)

You did an AmigaPython port? Fun! How long does something like that
take?

How long do you think a new roguelike from scratch would take in
Python and where the most time is spent? I am afraid of a lot of work
on options like magic and +ToHit etc., while I am more interested in a
smaller set of options but with a really smart AI.

[Will Stuyvesant]

> [Rene Pijlman]

Aahz:

You mean something like Chandler?
http://osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_Vision.htm

Yes, that's what I meant. Although Chandler seems much more ambitious.
Very interesting project.

I wonder how healty it is: their wiki is empty, the Mitch Kapor blog
is stopped, there is not much recent news. But interesting certainly.

[Will Stuyvesant]

> [Brandon J. Van Every]

Will, are you aware that I'm beginning exactly this project? Well, not the
twisted bit, I don't even know what that is or why one would want it.
Please see my post "ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python." I'd be interested
in your feedback even if my project goals don't match yours.
I have that posting saved somewhered, rather too expensive to read
online (telephone). Will do.

...
There's Umbra. http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Umbra/ Graphics and
gameplay aren't great, but it is something to start with.
Thanks for the link, going to look at it.

If you go to http://www.thangorodrim.net/ and search with the keyword
"Python," you will find some roguelikes that claim to have various amounts
of Python support in them. I haven't chased any of these down myself
though. At some point I gave up on the "do a RPG" project excuse, opting
instead for 4X TBS because it's more directly applicable to my Ocean Mars
project.

I don't know what TBS is.

Can you show something of the Ocean Mars project, link, screenshots?

[Paul Rubin]

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:

How long do you think a new roguelike from scratch would take in
Python and where the most time is spent?
These things can be as simple or as complicated as you like. Remember
that the original Rogue ran on a PDP-11 so it can't have been that large.
I am afraid of a lot of work on options like magic and +ToHit etc.,
while I am more interested in a smaller set of options but with a
really smart AI.

Well, that's lots of work too.

[Will Stuyvesant]

> [Paul Rubin]

A CVS-like system for email...
...It should be able to create a single
tarball or zipfile that you download, and accept a single tarball or
zipfile when you upload

I've been wanting for a while to write something like this. Everyone
I've mentioned it to wants to use it. I'm amazed it doesn't exist
already, at least in any well-known form.

Indeed an interesting project! And include newsgroups like
comp.lang.python too!

For another project I finally got the "upload zip", "unzip",
"base64encode" etc. thing right: users can send a .zip file via a HTML
INPUT file="type" and the CGI script unzips it, and can send zipped
parts to the next page, etc. Would like to warn you: it seems easy
but it took me some retries to get it right. If you are interested I
can put the code somewhere on the net.

[Ville Vainio]

Yes, that's what I meant. Although Chandler seems much more ambitious.
Very interesting project.

I wonder how healty it is: their wiki is empty, the Mitch Kapor blog
is stopped, there is not much recent news. But interesting certainly.

Reading the blog at

http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/

suggests that he is turning his energies to execution:

""" What remains is the sometimes unglamorous process building the
complete team and orchestrating the complex software development
process efficiently to realize the dreams we have created. It is to
that end that I am now trying to turn my energies to. """

So the project seems healthy. Even if the blog entry starts in the
style of writing that usually accompanies "we tried our best, we had
good people, but we're screwed" announcements.

The fact that they have new job postings on the Announcements page,
dating Dec 18, can't be a bad sign either.

--
Ville Vainio http://www.students.tut.fi/~vainio24

[Rene Pijlman]

Will Stuyvesant:

I wonder how healty it is: their wiki is empty, the Mitch Kapor blog
is stopped, there is not much recent news.

Well, they hired someone only 11 days ago.
http://www.osafoundation.org/

--
René Pijlman

[John J. Lee]

Paul Rubin <http://ph****@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:

What would your favorite be?

A CVS-like system for email. You'd receive all your messages on a
server somewhere. You'd then be able to connect your laptop to the
internet, download ("check out") your mail, and read and reply to it
offline (not necessarily all of it). When you dial up again, the
replies get sent out and stored ("checked in") on the server, the
messages that you read get marked as read, the ones you didn't read
don't get marked, etc. The CVS-like aspect is that you can do the
same thing from your office computer, your friend's computer, etc., so
you have the same messages checked out on multiple clients at the same
time. The server automatically merges the "change sets" when you
check any in. Finally, the server shouldn't need any special protocol
to check messages in or out. It should be able to create a single
tarball or zipfile that you download, and accept a single tarball or
zipfile when you upload

As Michael says, you're pretty much describing disconnected IMAP. I'm
pretty sure it's supposed to handle multiple concurrent connections to
one account & mailbox well, but it doesn't have CVS-like merge
facilities -- I don't think I'd really want that, anyway.

In reality, though, disconnected operation seems to be poorly
implemented. At least, in Mulberry 2.x (or was in 3.x beta?), which
is supposed to be an exemplary IMAP client implementation, it didn't
really work for me (and Mulberry seems over-stuffed with features).
Maybe it does with the current 3.x releases, it's been over a year
since I tried it. Also, KDE's MUA (KMail?) is just getting support
for disconnected IMAP now, but I'm sure it'll be a while before it
actually works. Also, I've found it to be a pain to get MUAs working
with IMAP servers (mostly using pine, which again is supposed to be a
good IMAP implementation) -- I guess this is because the protocol has
too many knobs and dials for its own good. fastmail.fm has mostly
been very good (but one one-day outage during the recent power
failures in US, and another one before that -- I think they've
probably learned from that, though), very clueful and extremely good
value for money (one-off 15 USD payment when I joined, with quite
enough bandwith and storage for someone who has been subscribed to ten
or so mailing lists in the past, and gets a lot of spam, and I think
that price is still current).

If anybody knows of a free disconnected IMAP client that works
(especially in Python :-), please let me know!
John

[Irmen de Jong]

Will Stuyvesant wrote:

[Irmen de Jong]
While not written *in* Python, it's scriptable with Python:
http://www.thangorodrim.net/pangband.html (PAngband).

waaay back someone even created an Amiga version of this
game based upon Amiga Angband and my AmigaPython port :)

You did an AmigaPython port? Fun! How long does something like that
take?

Yeah, I did, years ago :-)
See: http://www.aminet.net/aminet.cgi?string=python+language

How long it took to port Python to the Amiga? A few weeks
work in my spare time... I used a totally different compiler
and had to adapt and extend the code to AmigaDOS.

How long it took to create a PAngband version on the Amiga?
I have no idea, I wasn't involved in that :-)
How long do you think a new roguelike from scratch would take in
Python and where the most time is spent? I am afraid of a lot of work
on options like magic and +ToHit etc., while I am more interested in a
smaller set of options but with a really smart AI.

If you're creating a game from scratch, most time will be spent
in game rules, combat rules, and balancing (!). Creating a good
balanced game is hard, I've been told.
Depending on what you want to do the actual programming
can take a lot of time too, if you want 'really smart' AI...
If you want to do a single player experience you'll need that,
if you go for a (massive?)multiplayer experience you don't really
need smart AI because the other characters are also played
by humans :-) But that's not 'roguelike', is it?
--Irmen

[Sami Juvonen]

On 26 Dec 2003 15:57:36 -0800,
Paul Rubin <> blurted:

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:

> What would your favorite be?

A CVS-like system for email. You'd receive all your messages on a
server somewhere. You'd then be able to connect your laptop to the
internet, download ("check out") your mail, and read and reply to it

You might be interested in OfflineIMAP.
http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap
--
"...you want a .sig with that?"

[JanC]

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) schreef:

I wonder how healty it is: their wiki is empty, the Mitch Kapor blog
is stopped, there is not much recent news. But interesting certainly.

Mitch Kapor is not only chairman of OSAF, but (at least) also of the
wxWindows Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. He might have a very busy
schedule... :-)

--
JanC

"Be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving."
RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - section 3.9

[Aahz]

In article <cb**************************@posting.google.com >,
Will Stuyvesant <hw***@hotmail.com> wrote:

[Rene Pijlman]

Yes, that's what I meant. Although Chandler seems much more ambitious.
Very interesting project.

I wonder how healty it is: their wiki is empty, the Mitch Kapor blog
is stopped, there is not much recent news. But interesting certainly.

Mitch Kapor was looking for a Python tutor a while back; he may be taking
a breather to really learn Python.
--
Aahz (aa**@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote
programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

[Andrew Dalke]

Me:

An integrated chemical/bioinformatics development and
exploration environment. Got a few million dollars to fund me?
(Actually, more like 10 million, but bootstrappable with only
a few million.)
Will Stuyvesant:

I guess all that money is needed for getting high quality people into
it? Or other reasons? What techniques would you use?
Have you scoped out how much it costs to run a company? Suppose
you want to pay a decent salary. Around here that's about $60 -
$70,000 for software developers, and about the same for good
computational chemists. (Maybe a bit higher, unlikely to be lower.)
Say 2 software developers, one with good comp. chemistry
experience, one with good QA skills, another for documentation,
and if it's the above environment then a usability engineer and
GUI developer -- call it 4 full-time equivalents, or about $1/4 million
per year. Add in overhead (health insurance, bookkeeping,
computers, etc.) and that's about $1/2 million per year.

If you've read "Crossing the Chasm", science -- especially the
so-called 'hard sciences' -- are on the early-adopter side of
the chasm. That is, there are a bunch of people who spent
years in libraries, doing research, writing papers, to get a PhD.
They have few qualms about spending more time and effort
to learn something. Compare this to sane people, who just
want things to work without usually needing to worry about
the details. I like that my car, a very complex device, needs
amazingly little attention from me. Scientists in their specialty
are the grease monkeys like my uncle who complained about
a 1938 model year truck which no longer had the door in
the firewall to tweak the carburetor while driving. One
chemist, when told by others that the software took a long
time to learn, replied "suck it up and just learn it."

I think this is bad, for two reasons. First, extending the
analogy a bit, it means the specialist are limited to 1930s
model cars instead of getting to 1960s rally cars; still able
to tweak and tune as needed, but it works and lets you
go places. Hence my company's motto "More Science,
Less Time."

Second, it prevents non-specialists from using the tools
for that field. There are many times when someone in
a related field (say, bioinformatics instead of chemical
informatics) needs use a few techniques, or times when
tasks once considered esoteric -- like a similarity search
of a subset of a DNA database -- are taught in
introductory-level courses. These must be made both
easy to use and robust in operation.

The problem with either approach is that it requires a
lot of new software to be written or rewritten, for reasons
I won't get into. Scientists tends to be more reactionary
than average, and stay with software where all the warts
are known rather than worrying about new bugs, or
having to justify in talks and papers why a new approach
was used over the standard one.

Putting all these together, that means any good software
for this field will take a lot of work, a lot of time, and a
long, slow acceptance period, which means it will take
3 to 4 years before my project dream is self-supporting.
Hence, "a few million dollars."

Instead, I'm doing consulting -- but still looking for a
company or three interested in funding me to work on
my dream. :)
And I can not do C bindings (too long ago I did C).
Besides I don't *want* to C again :-)
Tools like SWIG make it quite easy.
My answer then is to do any of these projects; they are all great
ones to learn how to do larger, more useful projects.

Um, more useful? Can you give some more examples of what
you think useful?

He-he. I'm very biased in this respect, so everything I
can think of is in the computational life sciences, and
even when I relax that restriction I still end up with
things that I might make a living out of. "Useful" at this
point in my life means making money to live on, travel,
enjoy myself -- ie, the proverbial "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness."

The list you gave (two games, a vector graphics program,
and a weblog program) don't fall into that category for
me since there's too much competition already in those
domains.
I am looking for a fun project and inspiration and maybe even fun
people who join a project, you got that right :-)

Go to sourceforge and browse the list until you find
something interesting. If you want, you can even limit
the search to Python. Or go to bioinformatics.org and
look through the list there. ;)

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

[Christian Tismer]

Ville Vainio wrote:

....

- Implement fast native code compilation for Python (though this is
well beyond my capabilities). This might be interesting also in the
sense of creating a compiler in Python, even though it might not be
that fast...

Before elaborating on that and spending much time thinking
about the details, please have a look into the PyPy project.
If you then still consider to roll your own, please let
us know why. http://www.codespeak.net/pypy

Thanks a lot -- chris

--
Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:ti****@stackless.com>
Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's
Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9a : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/
14109 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/
work [phone] home [phone] mobile [phone]
PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04
whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/

[Christian Tismer]

Will Stuyvesant wrote:

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

I would like to provide some ideas which I'm carrying
around since quite some time. My reluctance is about
the fact that I almost never saw an announcement like
this being a serious offer. Most of the time it was
just some sugar spread around to make people excited,
creating lengthy threads with no result.
How serious are you about spending a reasonable amount
for a really innovative application in Python. I'm a bit
curious since none of my google hits reach beyond 2003.

ready to be convinced -- happy new year - chris

--
Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:ti****@stackless.com>
Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's
Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9a : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/
14109 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/
work [phone] home [phone] mobile [phone]
PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04
whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/

[Paul Rubin]

Christian Tismer <ti****@stackless.com> writes:

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

I would like to provide some ideas which I'm carrying around since
quite some time. My reluctance is about the fact that I almost never
saw an announcement like this being a serious offer. Most of the
time it was just some sugar spread around to make people excited,
creating lengthy threads with no result. How serious are you about
spending a reasonable amount for a really innovative application in
Python. I'm a bit curious since none of my google hits reach beyond 2003.

I don't see any bad consequences of posting interesting ideas for projects,
even if nobody takes them up.

[Andrew Dalke]

Christian Tismer:

Most of the
time it was just some sugar spread around to make people excited,
creating lengthy threads with no result. How serious are you about
spending a reasonable amount for a really innovative application in
Python.

Paul Rubin: I don't see any bad consequences of posting interesting ideas for projects, even if nobody takes them up.

Suppose it takes 15 minutes for Christian to write up an idea.
Suppose it then starts a thread, and he spends another 45 minutes
on that thread to get his point across. And suppose it goes nowhere.
(As he says, that's the usual case. It's easy to talk, hard to do.)
Then that's an hour which could have been spent on more productive
efforts.

Oh, the first couple dozen times it's fun to shoot the breeze like
that, but after a while that sugar turns into saccarine.

Are you going to the Python conference? That's a great way to
talk with a lot of people and get ideas for projects. (And they
too have their own way to convert sugar into artificial sweetners.)

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

[Paul Rubin]

"Andrew Dalke" <ad****@mindspring.com> writes:

Suppose it takes 15 minutes for Christian to write up an idea.
Suppose it then starts a thread, and he spends another 45 minutes
on that thread to get his point across. And suppose it goes nowhere.
(As he says, that's the usual case. It's easy to talk, hard to do.)
Then that's an hour which could have been spent on more productive
efforts.
There could be a wiki page somewhere with a list of interesting
project suggestions. I'd put stuff there. I can think of all kinds
of cool programs that I'd like for other people to write ;-).
Are you going to the Python conference? That's a great way to
talk with a lot of people and get ideas for projects. (And they
too have their own way to convert sugar into artificial sweetners.)

Nah, too expensive, I may go to CodeCon.

[Will Stuyvesant]

> [Paul Rubin]

[Christian Tismer]
I would like to provide some ideas which I'm carrying around since
quite some time. My reluctance is about the fact that I almost never
saw an announcement like this being a serious offer. Most of the
time it was just some sugar spread around to make people excited,
creating lengthy threads with no result. How serious are you about
spending a reasonable amount for a really innovative application in
Python. I'm a bit curious since none of my google hits reach beyond 2003.

I don't see any bad consequences of posting interesting ideas for projects,
even if nobody takes them up.

I was not looking for a job! I was just thinking about a project to
work on in my spare time, to sharpen my Python skills and because it
is fun. I already have a job (with some Python programming).

But um, Christian: what is that "really innovative application" you
mention? Something stackless? Or can't you share the idea because
you don't want others to start working on it?

[Nicola Larosa]

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Hash: SHA1

I've been wanting for a while to write something like this. Everyone
I've mentioned it to wants to use it. I'm amazed it doesn't exist
already, at least in any well-known form.

You may wish to look at Quotient, by Divmod (the Twisted guys):

http://www.divmod.org/Quotient/index.html

While its scope is a little larger than email, it looks like it does (or will
do) most of what you need.
- --
Nicola Larosa - ni*******@m-tekNico.net

"A mathematical regularity, or syntax, is implicit in the world's
phenomena and can be said to *explain* the world no less and no more
than the grammatical syntax of a speech explains the content of the
speech." -- Steve Talbott, NetFuture

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[Cousin Stanley]

| Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project
| in Python.
|
| What would you like to do ?

Will ....

You might spend some time checking the requests for programs
at the Made-To-Order freeware site ....

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~madman/software/order.htm

There are enough requests there
to keep a L A R G E army of coders busy
for a very L O N G time ....

--
Cousin Stanley
Human Being
Phoenix, Arizona

[Christian Tismer]

Will Stuyvesant wrote:

....

I was not looking for a job! I was just thinking about a project to
work on in my spare time, to sharpen my Python skills and because it
is fun. I already have a job (with some Python programming).
Sorry, I've misread your posting. I thought you had money to
spend on a new, larger project. No offense in any way.
But um, Christian: what is that "really innovative application" you
mention? Something stackless? Or can't you share the idea because
you don't want others to start working on it?

I have several. One of them is a radically different file
system. But in fact, I won't talk about it before getting
a first version done :-)

ciao - chris

--
Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:ti****@stackless.com>
Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's
Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9a : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/
14109 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/
work [phone] home [phone] mobile [phone]
PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04
whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/

[Andrew Dalke]

Paul Rubin:

There could be a wiki page somewhere with a list of interesting
project suggestions. I'd put stuff there. I can think of all kinds
of cool programs that I'd like for other people to write ;-).

Well, isn't that the problem? I can think of quite a few as
well. (Again, all chemical and bio- informatics related.) But
from experience the odds of anyone else working on them is
very low and the effort spent on putting those ideas on a
wiki, knowing that it's almost certainly going to be ignored,
makes it simply not worth it.

Now, if you said "I'm going to work on all kinds of cool
programs that others suggested" then that's something
different. Even then, you're going to work on things you
are interested in, which is only a small number of the
projects in the world that others consider interesting.

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

[Brad Clements]

"Cousin Stanley" <Co***********@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:bs************@ID-130333.news.uni-berlin.de...

You might spend some time checking the requests for programs
at the Made-To-Order freeware site ....

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~madman/software/order.htm

There are enough requests there
to keep a L A R G E army of coders busy
for a very L O N G time ....

This site is out of date. Clicking on "this months requests" shows stuff
from May of 2000.

I think the site is dead. Clicking on "discusson forum" gives a 404 error.

[Paul Rubin]

"Andrew Dalke" <ad****@mindspring.com> writes:

There could be a wiki page somewhere with a list of interesting
project suggestions. I'd put stuff there. I can think of all kinds
of cool programs that I'd like for other people to write ;-).

Well, isn't that the problem? I can think of quite a few as well.
(Again, all chemical and bio-informatics related.) But from
experience the odds of anyone else working on them is very low and
the effort spent on putting those ideas on a wiki, knowing that it's
almost certainly going to be ignored, makes it simply not worth it.

Shrug. The GNU project has had a project list since the 80's. Some
things stayed on it for many years and were eventually taken up by
somebody. I think if someone asks for a project and you spend a bunch
of time thinking one up on the spot, and then the person doesn't go
anywhere with it, that's not so great. If you think up something
on your own devices and put it on a list that thousands of people
will look at, that's a bit more promising.

[Cousin Stanley]

| This site is out of date.
| Clicking on "this months requests"
| shows stuff from May of 2000

Brad ....

The site is old and out of date,
but I think that many of the requests for programs
may still be valid and perhaps a good source
of inspiration for coders looking for projects ....

Pack a lunch, then try the Request Archive ....

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~madman/softwar...q/archived.htm

--
Cousin Stanley
Human Being
Phoenix, Arizona

[Lonnie Princehouse]

I keep thinking that a good graph module would be really handy (as in
nodes and edges, not plotting), with the ability to traverse and
manipulate graphs in nice Pythonic ways, as well as implement some
basic graph theory (finding cycles, paths, cliques, etc). I've
started writing one, but it's nowhere near completion.

[Andrew Dalke]

Lonnie Princehouse:

I keep thinking that a good graph module would be really handy (as in
nodes and edges, not plotting)
I've wondered about Boost. There's Boost Python of course,
and Boost includes a graph library with many of the features you've
listed. But do the two work well together? I dunno.
with the ability to traverse and manipulate graphs in nice Pythonic ways,
And I really don't know if the result will feel Pythonic. I barely
understand how to make the examples work, much less what
needs to be done to get a full melding.
basic graph theory (finding cycles, paths, cliques, etc). I've
started writing one, but it's nowhere near completion.

I have two C extensions for Python which do max clique detection.
See http://starship.python.net/crew/dalke/clique/ . But I haven't
tested them in over 4 years.

BTW, I've done various bits of graph theory work for molecular
structures. I've found that the nomenclature is different enough
that it's hard for chemistry and graph theory to share each other's
data structures directly. (Eg, we want "atoms", which are
"colored nodes", and "bonds", which are "colored undirected
edges" of low valence (usually 4 or less, rarely above 6, and
never larger than about 13.)

Still, I'll be interested in anything you have, especially
subgraph isomorphism. (There is Brian Kelly's "Frowns"
package which has a Python interface to the VF algorithm
but it needs to convert to VF's data structures before doing
the search, and that apparently takes most of the time.)

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

[Brian Kelley]

Andrew Dalke wrote:

Lonnie Princehouse:

I keep thinking that a good graph module would be really handy (as in
nodes and edges, not plotting)

I've wondered about Boost. There's Boost Python of course,
and Boost includes a graph library with many of the features you've
listed. But do the two work well together? I dunno.

with the ability to traverse and manipulate graphs in nice Pythonic ways,

And I really don't know if the result will feel Pythonic. I barely
understand how to make the examples work, much less what
needs to be done to get a full melding.

basic graph theory (finding cycles, paths, cliques, etc). I've
started writing one, but it's nowhere near completion.

I have two C extensions for Python which do max clique detection.
See http://starship.python.net/crew/dalke/clique/ . But I haven't
tested them in over 4 years.

I have and just last year. They work pretty well but I think that there
might be better algorithms. I had them working under python 2.2 but
they aren't useful out of the box since there is no driver. I can
package it with the one that I have (the graph is represented as a
numeric matrix) if anyone is really interested.
BTW, I've done various bits of graph theory work for molecular
structures. I've found that the nomenclature is different enough
that it's hard for chemistry and graph theory to share each other's
data structures directly. (Eg, we want "atoms", which are
"colored nodes", and "bonds", which are "colored undirected
edges" of low valence (usually 4 or less, rarely above 6, and
never larger than about 13.)
This is a bit of a pain, algorithms might want to use node and edge or
vertex and edge while chemists want to use atom and bond.
Still, I'll be interested in anything you have, especially
subgraph isomorphism. (There is Brian Kelly's "Frowns"
package which has a Python interface to the VF algorithm
but it needs to convert to VF's data structures before doing
the search, and that apparently takes most of the time.)
I have minimized this somewhat, but I expect that it still is going to
be slow to keep parallel graph structures (python->C++) (python->boost).
I have almost completed a pure-python version of vflib, mainly for the
purpose of doing recursive graph searching. It doesn't appear to be
much slower than the C++ counterpart and doesn't have the start up time
conversion. The vflib package is available seperately from frowns by
the way.

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

Brian.

[Lonnie Princehouse]

> Andrew Dalke wrote:

I've wondered about Boost. There's Boost Python of course,
and Boost includes a graph library with many of the features you've
listed. But do the two work well together? I dunno.
I can't find any reference to the Boost Graph library being used with
Boost Python, but that doesn't mean it can't be done =)

with the ability to traverse and manipulate graphs in nice Pythonic ways,

This is a bit of a pain, algorithms might want to use node and edge or
vertex and edge while chemists want to use atom and bond.

What I mean by Pythonic is mostly an ability to subclass Graphs and
Nodes and perhaps even Edges. This would help the nomenclature
disparity, but probably comes with a considerable performance hit:

class Molecule(Graph):
...

class Atom(Node):
...

class Bond(Edge):
...
BTW, I've done various bits of graph theory work for molecular
structures. I've found that the nomenclature is different enough
that it's hard for chemistry and graph theory to share each other's
data structures directly. (Eg, we want "atoms", which are
"colored nodes", and "bonds", which are "colored undirected
edges" of low valence (usually 4 or less, rarely above 6, and
never larger than about 13.)
My motivation is to tinker around with control flow in abstract syntax
trees, so I'm using directed acyclic graphs. It will certainly
involve lots of searching for subgraph isomorphism, though.
Still, I'll be interested in anything you have, especially
subgraph isomorphism. (There is Brian Kelly's "Frowns"
package which has a Python interface to the VF algorithm
but it needs to convert to VF's data structures before doing
the search, and that apparently takes most of the time.)

I have minimized this somewhat, but I expect that it still is going to
be slow to keep parallel graph structures (python->C++) (python->boost).
I have almost completed a pure-python version of vflib, mainly for the
purpose of doing recursive graph searching. It doesn't appear to be
much slower than the C++ counterpart and doesn't have the start up time
conversion. The vflib package is available seperately from frowns by
the way.

I wasn't aware of vflib, but it looks very nice. Perhaps I'll stop
working on my own internal graph representation and start working on a
way to make all of the various graph libraries play nicely together in
Python (I'm thinking Boost Graphs + vflib + graphviz).. and also to
improve the graphviz/Python bindings a little bit (apparently it still
requires writing/reading files in graphviz's language)

[Ionutz Borcoman]

hw***@hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) wrote in message news:<cb**************************@posting.google. com>...

Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
Python. What would you like to do?

I want to do a 'Where Is It?' clone in Python. Probably use Metakit
and e4graph as the database. PyGTK or WxPython for the GUI (most
probably PyGTK).

I'll probably do it anyway, but money would help a lot :)

ionutz