Flickr'ing Desktop

For the last few days, I've been running a Python script to grab a random Flickr photo tagged with “IDII” every five minutes and display it as my desktop photo. Here's a selection:

Language Design Insight from Python

The Python Enhancement Proposals seem, at first glance, a suprisingly place to find insight into programming language design. On further reflection, though, it appears inevitable that documents designed to justify, explain, and specify new features in a superbly-thought-out language would be models of clarity, conciseness, and interest. Along, with Paul Graham's essays (e.g. on Arc and Lisp), I recommend them to anyone interested in programming or software design (even if you abhor semantically-significant white-space in source code).

PEP 343: Anonymous Block Redux and Generator Enhancements proposes new syntax and keywords for Python. While fairly technical, this gets at the heart of language design: what abstractions and structures get encoded into the syntax, and how? Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, offers specific reasons for preferring one notation over another and insights into the way in which such designs evolve.

Here's an excerpt to give you an idea of the style (don't worry, it makes sense in context):

The idea was to define the template like this:

        @with_template
        def opening(filename):
            f = open(filename)
            try:
                yield f
            finally:
                f.close()

and used it like this:

        with f = opening(filename):
            ...read data from f...

The problem is that in PEP 310, the result of calling EXPR is assigned directly to VAR, and then VAR's __exit__() method is called upon exit from BLOCK1. But here, VAR clearly needs to receive the opened file, and that would mean that __exit__() would have to be a method on the file.

PEP 318 discusses various proposed syntaxes for function decorators, which ended up looking like this:

        @classmethod
        @synchronized(lock)
        def foo(cls):
            pass

This was only agreed on, however, after months of battle and hundreds of alternatives, and the PEP has links to all the gory details. It's good to see people passionate about the fine details of programming, even if it means spending weeks arguing over the relative merits of ! and @.

Other interesting PEPs include Iterators (#234), Simple Generators (#255) and Generator Expressions (#289).

Possible Thesis Topics

Working titles, deliberately vague.

Extra-Textual Tools for the Working Programmer
Visual Interfaces for Physical Computing
Software Tools for Custom or Interactive Data Visualizations
Experiments in Social Software
Explorations of Internet Media as Extensions of the Nervous System

Thoughts?

Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano, Designing Visual Interfaces

A good overview of the application visual principles to the design of user interfaces. This includes topics like hierarchy, balance, harmony, etc. An especially interesting section discusses various visual attributes (hue, value, size, orientation, shape, position, and texture) and their perceptual properties (e.g. we can instantly pick out objects of a particular color, but not shape, from a mixed collection). The diagrams feel old-fashioned, but give an appreciation for the clarity and consistency of the original Mac interface. The color plates are mostly wasted on examples of bad design or diagrams found elsewhere in the book. For better illustrations and an excellent discussion of these same principles applied to data presentation as opposed to UI design, see Edward Tufte's books, especially Envisioning Information.

For more information on Designing Visual Interfaces, see these excerpts and diagrams.