popular demand [01/12/2007 19:44:09]
Don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years.
-- LL Cool J
Well now! I submitted the naked python link to programming.reddit.com, and the discussion made it onto the front page. Someone else submitted embrace the heresy and that even made it to the front page of reddit proper. It seems there's a market for functional python.
I guess I should explain what this is all about.
One of my personal goals to accomplish by this August is to clean up and formally release my web framework. I've been tinkering with this code since 1999. It's just that all along I've made the mistake of trying to make a framework for everyone without trying to involve anyone. Obviously rails and django and turbogears beat me to it.
At this point, I don't see much point pushing yet another python framework unless it can be, as the pythonistas say, something completely different.
And so I decided to embrace the heresy of functional programming. I always had functional leanings, but I tended to curb my ideas so as not to go against the grain of the language - as the naked example shows, a functional python program isn't readable without syntactic sugar.
There is some new work to be done given the functional emphasis, but mostly I'm just refactoring to expose the functional ideas. Some of that refactoring is going to involve converting to a new syntax, but that's not too hard to automate given the compiler package.
Also, someone on reddit pointed out Noodle, a lisp-on-python that's much further along than the old lython code (which isn't even on the net outside the wayback machine).
Noodle rocks. The author, Paul Cannon, has put a lot of work into the system. You can get the code, and (if you have OpenOffice), see a see a presentation about it over at xillion.org. There wasn't a license in sight, but I emailed Paul and he told me it was available under an MIT-style license.
Paul mentioned in the noodle blog that he's not very happy with the syntax he's come up with.
Well, I've been kicking around ideas for ecdysis for quite a while, and I have a lot of ideas about syntax. I figured it was about time I wrote something up - not just about ecdysis, but sort of a big picture view of the whole system.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, I once again give you... Scarlet Lambda.