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Hi. It’s been a while. I beg your forgiveness.

I gave a slightly silly talk about the programming language Python to the Rice CS Club last Thursday. It was a pretty mixed audience (ranging from “I’m not sure what Python is” to “what do you think of the new 2.5 features?”) so I tailored the lecture to experienced programmers and scientists new to Python in particular. The slides, along with some links I promised to the attendees, are collected on my new python page.

While we’re on the topic: If you’re a parselmouth and build web applications for fun or profit, you should be aware that web.py version 0.2 came out last week. The tutorial has been updated to use all the schmancy new features, like the built-in template system (replacing Cheetah, which is a little heavyweight for the web.py approach, which is something along the lines of “the absolute least amount of code that still saves you a substantial amount of work”). I’m looking forward to using the 0.2 release to whip up a redesign of the Beer-Bike tee shirt database in time for the 50^th anniversary of the college system (and, hence, of Beer-Bike).