• Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Vala

  Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

  Vala combines the high-level build-time performance of scripting languages with the run-time performance of low-level programming languages.

  Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes notable features such as anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements.

  Its developers, Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini, wanted to bring these features to the plain C runtime with little overhead and no special runtime support by targeting the GObject object system. Rather than compiling directly to machine code or assembly language, it compiles to a lower-level intermediate language. It source-to-source compiles to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler for a given platform, such as GCC.

  Did you always want to write GTK+ or GNOME programs, but hate C with a passion? Learn Vala with these free tutorials!

  Vala is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1+.

• Supporting Perl-related creators via Patreon

  Yesterday I posted about this in the Perl Weekly newsletter and both Mohammad and myself got 10 new supporters. This is awesome.

  There are not many ways to express the fact that you really value the work of someone.
  You can send them postcards or thank-you notes, but when was the last time you remembered to do that?

  Right, I also keep forgetting to thank the people who create all the free and awesome stuff I use.

  Giving money as a way to express your thanks is frowned upon by many people, but trust me, the people who open an account on Patreon to make it easy to donate them money will appreciate it.

  In any case it is way better than not saying anything.

• 2020.31 TwentyTwenty

  JJ Merelo kicked off the special 20-day Advent Blog cycle in honour of the publication of the first RFC that would lay the foundation for the Raku Programming Language as we now know it. After that, 3 blog posts got already published:

• Supporting The Full Lifecycle Of Machine Learning Projects With Metaflow

  Netflix uses machine learning to power every aspect of their business. To do this effectively they have had to build extensive expertise and tooling to support their engineers. In this episode Savin Goyal discusses the work that he and his team are doing on the open source machine learning operations platform Metaflow. He shares the inspiration for building an opinionated framework for the full lifecycle of machine learning projects, how it is implemented, and how they have designed it to be extensible to allow for easy adoption by users inside and outside of Netflix. This was a great conversation about the challenges of building machine learning projects and the work being done to make it more achievable.

• Django 3.1 Released

  The Django team is happy to announce the release of Django 3.1.

• Awesome Python Applications: buku

  buku: Browser-independent bookmark manager with CLI and web server frontends, with integrations for browsers, cloud-based bookmark managers, and emacs.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Week 9 Check-in

• AdminLTE - Jinja2 Template

  This article is a short introduction in Jinja2, a modern templating language used by Python programmers in frameworks like Flask, Bottle, optionally in Django from 1.8 version.

• Giovanni Mascellani: Bye bye Python 2!

  And so, today, while I was browsing updates for my Debian unstable laptop, I noticed that aptitude wouldn't automatically upgrade python2 and related packages (I don't know why, and at this point don't care). So I decided to dare: I removed the python2 package to see what the dependency solver would have proposed me. It turned out that there was basically nothing I couldn't live without.

• Jacob Perkins: Python Vulnerability Checking Links

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #10

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Blog #5 (26th Jul - 2nd Aug)

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Sorting Things Out

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Phase 3 - Weekly Check-in 10

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Lifecycle hooks, threading and notification system in the user story system in GSOC'20

• PSF GSoC students blogs: BLOG POST #5

Thank you to everyone who made this year’s JuliaCon great! As a parting gift, the Julia developers are pleased to announce the release of Julia v1.5.0, the fifth minor release in the 1.x series. Jeff and Stefan put together a blog post highlighting some of the most exciting new features in 1.5. Check it out!

As usual, binaries are available for all of your favorite platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD) at https://julialang.org/downloads.

As a minor release, v1.5.0 contains no breaking changes, only new features, performance improvements, and marginal, undisruptive changes in behavior. You can also see the NEWS file for the full set of changes.

Note that like 1.5, like its predecessor 1.4, does not have long term support. As of this release 1.4 has been effectively superseded by 1.5, which means that there will not likely be any further 1.4.x releases. Julia 1.0 is still currently the only long term support version.

We encourage everyone to give it a try. Packages can test with 1.5.0 on CI by specifying 1.5 on Travis, AppVeyor, Cirrus, and GitHub Actions. As always, let us know in the issue tracker if you run into any issues.

Also: Julia 1.5 has been released

       

• Why proactively clean Python 2 up?

  It seems a recurring complaint that we’re too aggressive on cleaning Python 2 up from packages. Why remove it if (package’s) upstream still supports py2? Why remove it when it still works? Why remove it when somebody’s ready to put some work to keep it working?

  I’m pretty sure that you’re aware that Python 2 has finally reached its end-of-life. It’s past its last release, and the current version is most likely vulnerable. We know we can’t remove it entirely just yet (but the clock is ticking!), so why remove its support here and there instead of keeping it some more?

  This is best explained on the example of dev-python/twisted — but dev-python/pillow is also quite similar. Twisted upstream removed support for Python 2 at version 20. This means that we ended up having to keep two versions of Twisted — 19 that still supports Python 2, and 20 that does not. What does that means for our users?

  Firstly, they can’t normally upgrade Twisted if at least one of its reverse dependencies supports Python 2 and is installed. What’s important is that the user does not have to meaningfully need or use Python 2 in that reverse dependency. It is entirely sufficient that it supports Python 2 and the user is using default PYTHON_TARGETS.

  Of course, you could argue that changing the default PYTHON_TARGETS would resolve the problem without having to proactively remove Python 2 from Twisted revdeps. Today, I’m not sure which of the two options is better. However, back when cleanup started changing default PT would involve a lot of pain for the users. We’d have to reenable 2.7 via package.use for many packages (but which ones?) or the users would have to reenable it themselves. But that’s really tangential now.

       

• Python Bytes: #192 Calculations by hand, but in the compter, with Handcalcs

  Idea by Guido van Rossum to bring back the print statement.

       

• PyDev 7.7.0 released (mypy integration improvements, namespace packages)

  This release brings multiple improvements for dealing with type hints as well as improvements in the Mypy integration in PyDev:

  The MYPYPATH can now be set automatically to the source folders set on PyDev and the --follow-imports flag is set to silent by default (this flag is required because only one file is analyzed at a time in PyDev as failing to do so would end up showing errors for other files).

       

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #10

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-In: Week 10

• Perl Weekly Challenge 71: Peak Elements and Trim Linked List

• The Perl Weekly Challenge #071

  With another Linked List related task, I am now enjoying it a lot. It also gives me the opportunity to work with Class in Raku. Learning Raku has changed my thinking a big way. The developer inside me is more organised than before. Also doing regular weekly challenge made me think from unit test point of view every time I come up with a solution. In fact, it dictates the design of my solution. Now with the regular Live Video Raku Reviews by Andrew Shitov gave me the insights of others Raku solutions. It is amazing how he break the code into pieces to make it easy to understand. No book can teach you that. You only learn from experience or watching video from Andrew Shitov.

  Running [The|Perl] Weekly Challenge also taught me how to manage my spare time. I use my spare time very carefully. Before I would jump to anything that excites me. Last few weeks, I have started playing with Swift programming language. I am enjoying the journey. Please checkout my Swift solution to the Task #1 of Peak Elements.

• Mariana Pícolo: The Second milestone

  By discussing with my mentor how could the best approach be, I found out that the notifications were already grouped on the code level, but these groups were not being represented in the UI.

  In the code, there's a class named Source, which is responsible for the group. They handle the info's about the app that have sent us any notification and store them.

  There's also a class named Notification, that creates a single notification, with title, banner, and has optional parameters such as playing sounds etc.

  Each Source has an array property that contains its notification objects, which gives us the groups.

  [...]

  Lastly, I'd like to talk about GUADEC which this year was completely remote.

  This was my first talk at a conference, in a language that I'm not a native speaker. I want to thank my mentor and the GNOME community for creating a comfortable environment for the interns to talk about their projects.