Leslie Lamport inventor of Paxos and developer of LaTeX introduces techniques and tools that help programmers think above the code level to determine what applications and services should do and ensure that they do it. Depending on the task, the appropriate tools can range from simple prose to formal, tool-checked models written in TLA+ or PlusCal

Large-scale is a poorly defined term, but I'll take a stab at this still...

Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license.

It was originally created for the new Python documentation, and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of Python projects, but C/C++ is already supported as well, and it is planned to add special support for other languages as well. Of course, this site is also created from reStructuredText sources using Sphinx! The following features should be highlighted:

• Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
• Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
• Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children
• Automatic indices: general index as well as a language-specific module indices
• Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
• Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from Python modules (API docs), and more
• Contributed extensions: more than 50 extensions contributed by users in a second repository; most of them installable from PyPI

virtualenvwrapper is a set of extensions to Ian Bicking’s virtualenv tool. The extensions include wrappers for creating and deleting virtual environments and otherwise managing your development workflow, making it easier to work on more than one project at a time without introducing conflicts in their dependencies.

The basic problem being addressed is one of dependencies and versions, and indirectly permissions. Imagine you have an application that needs version 1 of LibFoo, but another application requires version 2. How can you use both these applications? If you install everything into /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (or whatever your platform’s standard location is), it’s easy to end up in a situation where you unintentionally upgrade an application that shouldn’t be upgraded.

Or more generally, what if you want to install an application and leave it be? If an application works, any change in its libraries or the versions of those libraries can break the application.

Also, what if you can’t install packages into the global site-packages directory? For instance, on a shared host.

In all these cases, virtualenv can help you. It creates an environment that has its own installation directories, that doesn’t share libraries with other virtualenv environments (and optionally doesn’t access the globally installed libraries either).

Syntastic is a syntax checking plugin for Vim that runs files through external syntax checkers and displays any resulting errors to the user. This can be done on demand, or automatically as files are saved. If syntax errors are detected, the user is notified and is happy because they didn't have to compile their code or execute their script to find them.

The modular python source code checker: pep8, pyflakes and co

OpenGrok is a fast and usable source code search and cross reference engine. It helps you search, cross-reference and navigate your source tree. It can understand various program file formats and version control histories like Mercurial, Git, SCCS, RCS, CVS, Subversion, Teamware, ClearCase, Perforce, Monotone and Bazaar. In other words it lets you grok (profoundly understand) source code and is developed in the open, hence the name OpenGrok. It is written in Java.

Replace your VBA code with Python, a powerful yet easy-to-use programming language that is highly suited for numerical analysis. Supports Windows & Mac!

Ken Thompson's "cc hack"

Presented in the journal, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, in a paper entitled "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

Ken Thompson, co-author of UNIX, recounted a story of how he created a version of the C compiler that, when presented with the source code for the "login" program, would automatically compile in a backdoor to allow him entry to the system. This is only half the story, though. In order to hide this trojan horse, Ken also added to this version of "cc" the ability to recognize if it was recompiling itself to make sure that the newly compiled C compiler contained both the "login" backdoor, and the code to insert both trojans into a newly compiled C compiler. In this way, the source code for the C compiler would never show that these trojans existed.

The programming language Python has overtaken French as the most popular language taught in primary schools, according to a new survey released today.

Six out of ten parents said they want their primary school age children to learn the coding language over French. And 75% of primary school children said they would rather learn how to program a robot than learn a modern foreign language.

Free comprehensive online tutorials suitable for self-study and high-quality on site Python courses in Europe, Canada (Toronto) and the US

Many functional programming articles teach abstract functional techniques. That is, composition, pipelining, higher order functions. This one is different. I...

Python expert Jonathan Lettvin looks at some Python practices that shouldn't be used, but often can't be avoided.

web - Go Router + Middleware. Your Contexts.