Planet SoC

It seems like I’m the main (if not only) blogger here, so I’ll utilize this little piece of Internet to report about my Summer of Code experiences.

Well, I’ll do that when I have them. For now, I’m still hard at work for school and that’s likely to remain for the next 1.5 months. However, since SoC starts in a few weeks, I’ll have to start the careful balancing act of combining two stressful attention-craving things. Yikes!

So, what HAVE I done until now?

We (my mentor nash and I) have decided on a name for the project. It’s going to be “daneel-ai”, named after the famous robotic rule-based decision maker. I don’t foresee my AI saving mankind, but it would be a nice side-effect.

I’ve been reading about Git, managed to make a local repository and made my first push to the central server, then forgot everything about it. It just doesn’t stick around in my brain. I suppose this will be better when I have to use Git daily, for now, I still like SVN more. The power of a familiar environment.

Finally, I’ve started Python study, working my way through Dive Into Python. Currently around page 100. I’m still a bit unconvinced. I swear by object-oriented principles for any project that is bigger than a few hundred lines of code, and Python doesn’t seem very elegant for OOP. Handling self all the time, no protected methods, … On the other hand, lambdas and list comprehensions are lovely, but (as minor nitpick) I don’t like the “for … in” syntax. In Haskell, you can clearly make the separation between variables (which are alphanumerics) and syntax (which is basically | and <-). In Python, it’s all words, often all lowercase. I don’t find that to be promoting readability. But all in all, I suppose it’s one of the least bad languages we have…

Anyone know a decent Linux IDE for Python? I couldn’t get PyDev for Eclipse to install - it freezes when I input the environment info. Any others?