Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

There was another mildly amusing incident during the recent SoCal Piggies meeting.

Michael Carter was showing us his incredibly neat Web 3.0 / HTTP PUSH software, orbited, by demoing an interactive IRC client on the Web. He signed onto the ruby-on-rails IRC channel and (this being a Python meeting) asked "Is Python better than Ruby?"

The response, interestingly enough, was (and I paraphrase): "No. Ruby is more modern, and because it doesn't use whitespace, you don't have to use templates."

Well, that didn't make any sense to me, so I asked Michael to follow up with "what are templates?"

Next response? "In Python/Django, you need to use templates because Python isn't good for this stuff."

heh.

--titus

p.s. Should I hedge? Sure. "No, I don't think every Ruby person is so silly as to conflate 'Ruby' with 'Ruby on Rails' or 'Python' with 'Django'."

To get people talking, I've created a "biology-in-python" mailing list. You can subscribe here: http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/biology-in-python, and you can post to it at bip@lists.idyll.org once you're a member.

This list is a tool/package/library-agnostic list, for people who use Python to work in the biological sciences. Join us!

--titus

While I'm thinking about SciPy '07, here are a few other notes:

• Chris Lasher and I are thinking about doing a Software Carpentry sprint of some kind. Interested?
• I'd be up for doing a half-day tutorial on "Testing for Scientists" or "Idiomatic Python". Interested?

--titus

Chris Lee and I would like to set up a Birds-of-a-Feather gathering at SciPy '07. We'll probably have an initial meeting on Thursday, August 16th, and then maybe work into sprint mode for that Saturday.

Contact me if you're interested. No reservations needed, but we should probably all plan to meet at the same time ;).

--titus

I've just put up a simple lab Web site for my future lab at Michigan State U.; I'm calling it the Lab of Genomics, Evolution, and Development.

--titus