lesscode.org

Greetings fellow lesscode advocates. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an industry analyst with RedMonk, and as a couple of the folks here can probably attest, I take every opportunity to push your message and your values on an unsuspecting population of software vendor customers. Ryan’s been gracious enough to grant me the virtual floor as it were to speak to all of you today to request some assistance.

I’m the process of finalizing my keynote presentation for next week’s Zend/PHP conference entitled, conveniently enough, “PHP: Simplicity and Lesscode.” So here’s where I need some help, if you’re willing. My slides are trying to emphasize the role simplicity/lesscode play in all of our lives: both in technology and not. The deck currently starts from non-technology examples such as simple machines and builds to technology related examples, most of which are PHP centric for reasons that are probably pretty clear.

The question I have for all of you then is this: what examples - real world or technology related - might you use if you were trying to evangelize the twin values of s/l? What would/do you tell people that don’t get what lesscode is all about? As an example of the type of thing I’m looking for, I’m planning on opening with one of my favorite comp-sci stories of all time: Ryan’s Insects and Entropy. Adam Bosworth’s discussion of how Google uses the stupidest query language ever is also in there.

Hopefully those will give you an idea of the kind of things I’m looking for, and suggestions in any form would be appreciated. I can’t promise to use everything, but I’ll incorporate whatever I think I can fit in.

A couple of logistical notes:

1. Slides: will be made available following the conference under Creative Commons terms on my site, and here if the community here so desires. They’ll be offered under the same terms
2. Credit: will be given whenever possible during the presentation, and the closing page of the slides will contain the names of everyone whose contribution was included (so if you leave a comment, be sure that’s the name you’d like to have credited). That slide will also include a link to this entry, so that even suggestions that don’t make the deck may get some airtime.
3. Technology: given that this is a PHP conference, I’m probably not going to go in depth on Python, Ruby as much as I or some of you might like. So language specific examples will likely be genericized, just as an FYI, unless they compare more complex languages to PHP - in which case they’re encouraged.
4. Questions: drop them here, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Thanks for helping me get the lesscode message out, and I look forward to any conributions you might have.

As a follow up to my previous post on what I hope lesscode.org might become, I’d like to solicit the names of individuals you feel might be conned into posting here. Go ahead and drop names in the comments and I’ll heckle them. You can contact me by email as well.

Also, I’ve toyed with the idea of allowing open submissions but I don’t like the idea of playing editor. If anyone has ideas for taking open submissions and staying sane, please leave suggestions/experiences.

I’d really like to see an enhanced glob module. Nothing too crazy, just support for recursive wildcards and maybe a nice filtering API. Here’s your test case:

>>> import eglob

… or whatever.

A find function should return an iterator over all matching files and directories. Note that it should be possible to do recursive searches as the iterator is moving. yield kicks so much ass right here.

>>> eglob.find('/etc/**')
<generator object at ...>

Being able to filter the initial glob with such operations as exclude and include (needed?) would be nice. Designing this will be fun - try to abuse chaining generators as much as possible. :)

>>> list(eglob.find('/etc/**').exclude('passwd', 'group', 'init.d/*'))
['/etc/hosts', '/etc/httpd', '/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf']

I should be able to pass a extended glob (str, unicode) or a compiled regular expression (sre.SRE_Pattern) to any finding or filtering functions:

>>> list(eglob.find(re.compile(r'^/tmp/.*')))
['/tmp/mysql.sock', '/tmp/foo/bling']

I’d like to filter for directories only or files only:

>>> list(eglob.find('/home/*', directories=1))
['/home/hurly', '/home/curly', '/home/moe']
>>> eglob.find('**/.cvsignore', files=1)

This would be hugely useful in about four projects I’m currently working on.