In Silicon Valley is a very exclusive fast-food restaurant, which is always open. There is one table, where one guest at a time is served an absolutely fabulous hamburger. When you arrive, you wait in line until the table is available. Then the host takes you to the table and, this being America, yo...

In late 2005 I joined Google. The interviews took a surprising long time, which is a tale for another time. Today I want to tell a story that happened in one of my first weeks on campus.In the main building was an impressive staircase going up to the second floor. Somewhere near the top was a spacio...

This is something I posted on python-ideas, but I think it's interesting to a wider audience. There's been a lot of discussion recently about an operator to merge two dicts. It prompted me to think about the reason (some) people like operators, and a discussion I had with my mentor Lambert Meertens ...

I regularly receive questions from students in the field of computer science looking for career advice. Here's an answer I wrote to one of them. It's not comprehensive or anything, but I thought people might find it interesting. [A question about whether to choose a 9-5 job or be an entrepreneur] Th...

I'm turning off commenting for my blogs. While I've enjoyed some feedback, the time wasted to moderate spam posts just isn't worth it. Thank you, spammers! :-(

Union syntax (I'm trying to do this as a quick post in response to some questions I received on this topic. I realize this will probably reopen the whole discussion about the best syntax for types, but sorry folks, PEP 484 was accepted nearly a year ago, after many months of discussions and hundreds...

Type annotations for fspath Python 3.6 will have a new dunder protocol, __fspath__() , which should be supported by classes that represent filesystem paths. Example of such classes are the pathlib.Path family and os.DirEntry  (returned by os.scandir() ). You can read more about this protocol in the ...

The AnyStr type variable I was drafting a blog post on how to add type annotations for the new __fspath__()  protocol (PEP 519) when I realized that I should write a separate post about AnyStr . So here it is. A simple function on strings Let’s write a function that surrounds a string in parentheses...

Today the Netherlands celebrates King's Day. To honor this tradition, the Dutch embassy in San Francisco invited me to give a "TED talk" to an audience of Dutch and American entrepreneurs. Here's the text I read to them. Part of it is the tl;dr of my autobiography; part of it is about the significan...

After much back and forth I received a nice new Python book in the mail. The book's full title is "Introduction to Computer Science Using Python: A Computational Problem-Solving Focus", and its author is a very experienced educator, Charles Dierbach. This is not your average Python book -- it is a c...

Dear (insert name here), I heard you enjoy a certain programming language named Python. Programming is a wonderful activity. I am a little jealous that you have access to computers at your age; when I grew up I didn't even know what a computer was! I was an electronics hobbyist though, and my big dr...

With the most recent release (1.5.3, last week) App Engine's Python API for Memcache has added a new feature, Compare-And-Set. This feature (with a different API) was already available in Java; it has also been available in the non-App-Engine pure-Python memcache client. In fact, I designed the App ...

This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog it here. Warning: this is pretty unedited (or else it would never be published :-). I'm posting it in my "personal" blog instead of the "Python history" blog bec...

As of late I'm noticing a trend: I'm spending more time having in-person in-depth conversations, and less time coding. While I regret the latter, I really enjoy the former. Certainly more than weekly meetings, code reviews, or bikeshedding email threads. (I'm not all that excited about blogging eith...

While I was laying the groundwork for a new datastore client library with support for asynchronous requests, I added some low-level support for asynchronous RPCs that you can use today. The only App Engine API with documented support for asynchronous RPCs is urlfetch, and it happens to be quite usef...

This post is primarily intended for App Engine users (and of those, only Python users :-).Over the past months I've been working on a new design for the Python datastore API, under the code name Datastore Plus. The new design is very ambitious, and changes a lot of things:New, cleaner implementation...

Here's an idea that is just begging to be implemented as a Firefox extension.You know how there's a while-you-type spell checker that's always on when you are editing text in a multi-line text box? There should be a feature that takes the last few words you're typing (or the entire current paragraph...

Yesterday I attended a biweekly meeting of an informal a UC Berkeley group devoted to Python in science (Py4Science), organized by Fernando Perez. The format (in honor of my visit) was a series of 4-minute lightning talks about various projects using Python in the scientific world (at Berkeley and e...

I just heard from Bill Xu in China. His book "Lovely Python", an introduction to Python in Chinese, was just published and shot to the top-5 of china-pub.com's bestseller list (at some point it even was #2). I can't read Chinese, but I am very glad that there's a book on Python available for Chinese...

In yesterday's post I mentioned reading George Lakoff's book, The Political Mind. While I agree with the politics of the book in almost every instance, I was still disappointed. For one thing, the book "compresses well." (IOW it contains a lot of repetition. A Lot.) It also felt a bit like a classic...

[Warning: loose thoughts ahead!]Microsoft's Eric Meijer gave a talk at Google yesterday, and afterwards I had lunch with him. One of his remarks was (I paraphrase) that Microsoft users want to be told what to do, while the Java community is more vocal or argumentative. (He didn't discuss the Python ...

While CPython still rules on python-dev, especially with the excitement around Py3k, Python's alternative implementations are growing up: PyPy is now capable of running Django, Jython just released version 2.5, and IronPython has been releasing significant milestones like clockwork. I get a lot of s...

I still read a few print publications, including IEEE Computer. Today's issue contained a high and a low:Today's high point was a detailed history of the Conficker worm. Since we're a Macintosh family, and Google typically has its security stuff in order, I was barely aware of it. The sophistication...

At Google I/O I received a copy of Using Google App Engine by Charles Severance, published by O'Reilly. I haven't kept track, but this appears one of the first App Engine books to actually hit the stores -- an Amazon search for App Engine showed up one other book (Developing with Google App Engine b...

There's never a lack of books to use for learning Python. I occasionally receive books for review, but I don't have a particularly good yardstick to judge such books by: I find that they all contain some factual errors and some oddities of presentation, but I have no idea whether those matter for th...