Python’s Moratorium — Python language designers have declared a moratorium on enhancement proposals (feature requests) while the world’s Python programmers get used to the last batch of New And Shiny they shipped. I’m reasonably sure that the ALGOL designers went through exactly the same discussions, and I know Perl did too. So, don’t be afraid of it – don’t think that Python is evolutionarily dead – it’s not. We’re taking a stability and adoption break, a breather. We’re doing this to help users and developers, not to just be able to say “no” to every random idea sent to python-ideas, and not because we’re done. Reminds me of Perl god Jarkko Hietaniemi’s signature file: “There is this special biologist word we use for ‘stable’. It is ‘dead’. — Jack Cohen.
x86 Assembly Encounter — To use a construction industry metaphor, an average x86 assembler has the complexity and usefulness of a hammer, while the DSP world is using high-speed mag-rail blast-o-matic nail guns with automatic feeders and superconducting magnets. […] I find it ridiculous that the most popular computing platform in the world does not have a decent assembler. What’s even worse, from the discussions I’ve seen on the net, people are mostly interested in how fast the assembler is (?!) rather than how much time it saves the programmer. (via Hacker News)
Finding Tennis Courts in Aerial Photos — more hacking with computer vision techniques and publicly-available data. This is going to lead to good things (and some unpleasant surprises, as that which was formerly “too hard to find” ceases to be so). (via Simon Willison)
