pyninja

Are you trying to tell me that PG is not a web designer?!

I'm curious, have you ever actually had to do this? Even Rails only just got this feature in 3.1 (http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2011/4/18/why-http-streaming).

(I can see how you could get a mistaken impression from reading the discussion on HN, though.)

I'm reposting a reply I made earlier to irahul:

Pump aims to replace WSGI entirely. That is, I believe it does a better job of what WSGI was intended to do.

I understand your point that web developers don't necessarily work with WSGI on a day-to-day basis. But if you look at the Ruby web community, Rack middlewares are much more prevalent than WSGI middlewares. Application developers (as opposed to framework developers) often add functionality as a Rack middleware, so that it can be reused in different applications, even using different frameworks. Why isn't that happening with Python as much? In the Python world, instead of writing even simple middlewares to for basic functionality like https://github.com/adeel/pump/blob/master/pump/middleware/pa... or https://github.com/adeel/pump/blob/master/pump/middleware/co..., every framework ends up reimplementing it. I believe this is because the WSGI API is ugly and not as easy to understand as it could be (just look at the average WSGI middleware).

I understand your point that web developers don't necessarily work with WSGI on a day-to-day basis. But if you look at the Ruby web community, Rack middlewares are much more prevalent than WSGI middlewares. Application developers (as opposed to framework developers) often add functionality as a Rack middleware, so that it can be reused in different applications, even using different frameworks. Why isn't that happening with Python as much? In the Python world, instead of writing even simple middlewares to for basic functionality like https://github.com/adeel/pump/blob/master/pump/middleware/pa... or https://github.com/adeel/pump/blob/master/pump/middleware/co..., every framework ends up reimplementing it. I believe this is because the WSGI API is ugly and not as easy to understand as it could be (just look at the average WSGI middleware).

    # Pump
    def app(request):
        return {
          "status": 200,
          "headers": {"content_type": "text/plain"},
          "body": "Hello World"}

Do you really think anyone would benefit from such proofs in a paper? I would be interested if you could give an actual example of a paper where a reader might be inconvenienced by something being left as an exercise.

Obviously mathematicians don't leave "exercises for the reader" in research papers, but it is common in textbooks or expository writing.

> I always felt that phrase has no place in the internet age, where the concept of a "page limit" is laughable and a simple hyperlink can point me to chapters upon chapters of appendices.

The constraint is not page length, of course, but time. It is a much better use of a mathematician's time to leave easily reproducible proofs to the reader, and focus on the interesting ideas.

Anyway, doing these kinds of exercises is actually very useful in understanding new ideas.