Here's an amazing Stack Overflow question.

The follow-up conversation is great stuff.

The question shows two versions of approximately the same processing. Python is faster than Java. That's unexpected.

Java has static compilation and the hot-spot translation to machine code. Apparently, Python has some optimizations that are just as valuable …

A resume is a slippery thing -- a package of semi-structured data.

It has a kind of database-like feel to it, but there are so many exceptions and special cases that the database never works out quite the way you wanted.

For example, I've got -- essentially -- one employer over the past …

For a while, I generated documentation with Cheetah. I wrote bodies as a fragment of HTML and used Cheetah to wrap those bodies in standard templates with navigation and branding. To write my books, I learned DocBook markup and used DocBook XSL tools to create HTML and PDF versions of …

This is -- partially -- about the object-relational impedance mismatch.

But it's also about the parallel concepts between objects and relations. We'll use Python as our object model.

First, the obvious.

A SQL table is a list of rows. A row is a dictionary that maps a column name to a column …

Check this out: “Why should I bother?”.

All organizations have an “Official Technology List”. I work “Enterprise IT”, where the official languages are limited to Java, VB .Net, C, C++. After that... well... it may as well be Esperanto or Whitespace.

PHP, for example, is near the top of the …

About a year ago, we started out doing Python development with simple rst2htmldocuments for requirements, design, etc. In the code, we had comments that used epydoc with the epytextmarkup language.

No, it wasn’t confusing. Free-text documents (requirements, architecture, design, test plans, etc.) are easy and fun to …

Learned about module globals the hard way.

The mod_wsgi daemon by default spawns 15 threads. This is important, but not obvious.

During load testing, we had intermittent weird errors. We were seeing an odd inconsistency in replies. My experience in creating military software in the ’80’s leads me to …

On Stack Overflow I was captivated by "What tools would you used to write a modular database in Python? " and "Implementing a 'rules engine' in Python ".

Both questions are quite amazing because they already have a modular, flexible rules engine (called "python") but it's not good enough: they want to …

The Windows and .NET watch column, February 1, was Python: arbitrarily interesting . For certain classes of "interesting" problems, where interesting is defined arbitrarily, Python is an easy way to tackle those interesting problems.

It picks out a few specific areas of IronPython application, which is good and bad. Good because …

Check out Binstock's January 15th column in Software Development Times, Integration Watch: The End of PERL?

Very compelling case, generally free of the kind of subjective rants that often characterize analysis of PERL's viability. I tell people to drop PERL all the time, but I don't often have as clear …