After some processing by customers and us and vendors and god-alone-only-knows who else, our statistician has 4 zip files, each about 15Mb.

Step one is to look inside the zip archives and see what we have. Clearly, we can do this any of several ways. Looking manually doesn't get us …

See Did you ever switch from one programming language to another? A ridiculous question -- the answer is always "yes" unless you're a hobbyist.

See Programming Languages I've Learned In Order . See Programming Languages I've Learned (In Rough Order) Meme .

Here's my list.

High Scool - Early 70's

• IBM 1620 Assembler
• IBM …

I can't find the exact question -- it was something along the lines of "Why did you start with Python?" or "How did you choose Python?" It was probably one tagged with programming-languages .

For several days, I couldn't recall why or how I started looking at Python.

At first, all I …

The point, from the FAQ is to answer programming questions with people who a trusted by their peers.

Go to the Python tag to join that conversation.

Your reputation is your overall score. Every time your question (or answer) is voted up, you get 10 reputation points. Each time you're …

Here's what's great about Django coupled with the Django-REST Interface : It's almost all model. You define the model, write some tests. Add the URL mappings, write some tests using the built-in Django client.

We're almost there, but this doesn't work out perfectly. To do complete tests, we have to either …

Fundamentally, we need to provide explicit version identification on a schema. This is technically easy, but organizationally nearly impossible.

Technically, we need to use some kind of version control software for our model and the resulting DDL. We need some meta-meta-data to track schema names and version numbers. If we …

I've been asked about the proper location of Stored Procedures more than once. I've come down very strongly in opposition to triggers and stored procedures.

First, PL/SQL is slow . Anecdotally, people claim that introducing PL/SQL made an app faster. I submit that they restructured the application significantly to …

I'm trying to make sense of the "Voice of the Customer" as the 6σ folks term it.

I get email once in a while on my books (Programming , Python and OO Design ). The volume of mail indicates that I have a few hundred readers. I'm honored to have readers who …

Here's how it shakes out from my point of view. You could say that my bias is showing. I think, however, I have solid evidence for my opinions.

C++. Fine if you like memory management. Don't get me wrong, some people love the nitty-gritty details. Some people would prefer to …

I want to thank folks for their thoughtful comments.

I clarified a few design points.

Most importantly, I added four new appendices. For Python programmers, I provided examples of unittest, doctest and epydoc. For Java programmers, I provided examples of JUnit and javadoc.