[PYTHON META-SIG] Re: pattern-sig -- mission statement

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Ok, I'll give it another try. I inserted one more sentence in the
mission statement that Dinu originally posted. Hope that fixes the
'fluffy clouds' critique put forward by Barry.

Comments anyone ?

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Pattern-SIG Mission Statement

PATTERN-SIG, a Special Interest Group for using Python with
emphasis on idioms, patterns and frameworks.

This list has been created to provide a forum for discussing
issues related to using design techniques and practices
together with Python. The people who initiated this forum
simply believe that for various reasons Python is a wonderful
language that makes implementing and thinking about
higher-level design concepts very easy. These concepts range
from the small-scale programming idioms and 'tricks' to
medium-scale design patterns, usually comprising entities of
several classes, to large-scale designs based on frameworks,
often combining several patterns themselves. Some of the
reasons for believing in Python's appropriateness for this
programming-in-the-large area are the following ones. Python
is fully dynamically typed, which reduces the need to declare
variables to zero. Python code can therefore be typed much
faster allowing for playing with the design, something rather
impossible to do with statically typed languages. Being based
on indentation, Python's syntax is minimalistic and clean,
making it easy to read (and write) code and recognize
structures even when produced by others. Python is fully
object-oriented and lends itself much more to designing real
systems that do scale far better than any other bastardized
version of (so-called) object-oriented scripted languages.
Python can be regarded as a pretty ideal candidate for a
first language, making it easy to bundle design concepts like
those incorporated by patterns and frameworks right from the
start into developers and projects.

On this list we want to discuss along the lines of "Python
applied to higher-level design of programs", emphasizing
questions and issues, not to be learned from the study of a
programming language alone, but only from the interaction
with its users' experience and projects. We do believe that
there is valuable design experience to be communicated on
several levels (idioms, patterns, frameworks) and we want to
see that happen here. Mastering a given language is just one
part of the equation. Accessing a body of established design
knowledge is the other one.

To get things going people contributing here should revisit
their projects, either mentally or even in code, perhaps, and
ask themselves what it is they learned in a specific case,
how they solved a situation, what trick they used and, of
course, how this could be reproduced by them or others in a
useful way. More to the point, we are interested in what
patterns have emerged within the Python community, we are
curious to see if these are similar to those developed by
others and we'd like you be aware that you probably are
already using patterns, but that it makes much sense to be
aware about them for your own benefit and for that of others.
If you've been using design patterns consciously, even
better. We want to know about your experience and talk about
patterns from various sources like those of the Gang-of-Four
(GOF). Please share your experience with us!

! Our goal is to make these findings available to a larger public
! through the web, describing them and giving - if possible -
! code examples in reusable Python.

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We hope we can arrange for brief summaries of what is going on on
the PATTERN-SIG list to be posted to comp.lang.python about every
four weeks, although this won't be easy to do in a regular fashion...
But, ideally, it would allow people not present on the list to get
at least a rough idea of what is happening and help them decide if
they want to join.

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============================================================
List address:  pattern-sig@python.org

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============================================================


-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg           mailto:lemburg@uni-duesseldorf.de


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