• Some small improvements to the COBOL DDE parsing.
• A sensible demo program that shows how to read COBOL files.
• A complete rewrite to Python3.3.
• Support for more COBOL syntax.
• Support for Occurs Depending On
• Support for RECFM=F, RECFM=V and RECFM=VB …

See this: SortedContainers — sortedcontainers 0.6.0 documentation

Here's some text from the invitation.

You may find the the performance comparison and implementation details interesting because it doesn't use any sophisticated tree data structure or balancing algorithms. It's a great example of taking advantage of what processors are good at …

Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect Great article in Scientific American on this.

I didn't realize that sometimes I do spend time trying to defeat the Einstellung effect. Not a lot of time. But some time.

When confronted with gnarly design problems, I have the same bad habits …

While wrestling with Python's shelve module, I ran across ACID. Interesting thoughts. Plus what appears to be the related Tumblr blog: python sweetness. Also interesting. Not sure I can make heavy use of it right now, but it's helpful to see the thought process. I find the subject of shelve …

Epiphany.

In Python, with iterators, the Visitor design pattern is useless. And a strongly-ingrained habit. Which I'm trying to break.

Here's a common Visitor approach:

class Visitor:
    def __init__( self ): ...
    def visit( self, some_target_thing ): ...
    def all_done( self ): ...

v = Visitor()
for thing in some_iterator():
    v.visit(thing)
v.all_done()

If we …

JavaScript is a swampy foundation for your enterprise codebase: My latest column at SD Times http://t.co/a82aUquk0d — Larry O'Brien (@lobrien) February 20, 2014

Lazyweb: Django REST Framework vs. Tastypie. Thoughts? #django — Joe Dougherty (@modusjonens) February 17, 2014

Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse... I had a great chance to do some Test-Driven Reverse Engineering on a rather complex C program. I extracted test cases. I worked with the users to gather test cases. And I rewrote their legacy app …

Somewhere, I have a vague recollection of reading advice from someone (Bill Gates?) that it takes three versions to get things right. The context may have been a justification of the wild success of Windows 3.0.

Or, I could be just making it up.

But one thing I have …