The video doesn’t capture my BO, but otherwise, it’s pretty accurate.

I uploaded the code and my notes for my metaclasses talk to github here.

I’ll probably carve it up into a series of blog posts soon.

woo hoo!

The November issue of Python Magazine has my article on metaclasses. I regain the rights to my text after 3 months, so I’ll be posting sections of that article here as blog posts over the next year.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear critical feedback so that I can improve the material.

Or if you want to write a message telling me how awesome I am, that’s cool too, but I would prefer you give me money. In fact, that applies to people that want to call me an idiot. You also should just give me money.

Here’s what I submitted for a presentation topic for PyOhio:

TITLE: Decorators are fun

EXPERTISE LEVEL: Hopefully, there will be something for everyone. Novices might enjoy the material at the beginning mostly, while experts would likely be more interested in the ruledispatch discussion.

SUMMARY: This talk will start with a friendly walkthrough of decorators for people that have never seen them, then go into some straightforward examples, then finish with a review of how decorators are used in Philip Eby’s ruledispatch package.

OUTLINE:

• The simplest possible decorator.
• Pass arguments to a decorator.
• Write a decorator and still preserve the function signature of the decorated function.
• Coerce values into a function into types using decorators.
• Log values coming out of a function.
• Phillip Eby’s ruledispatch package implements generic functions, aka multimethods, for python. I’ll walk through how he uses decorators, and why they’re such a good idea for this.

Introduction to Python Decorators is available for you to read after you fill out the annoying registration form.

I have a few ideas for the next article. Do any of these seem interesting?

1. Demystify metaclasses: use metaclasses to add camel-cased aliases for underscored method names, show how to automatically make methods into properties, and build a crude ORM.
2. Explore logging with python, ranging from writing out to local files to setting up a syslog-ng server. Show how to use logging config files and filters.
3. Build a prototype inheritance system into python. I got really interested in prototype inheritance when I studied lua. Prototypes make it really easy to change class-based behaviors at run time.

Finally, the meaning behind the pirates-vs-ninjas debate became clear to me during a recent nitrous-oxide haze (no, not how you think; I was getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist). Anyhow, pirates and ninjas are symbols.

The ninja is a metaphor for the corporate employee. A ninja will get the job done or die trying. A ninja will kill everyone in his own family if he’s ordered to. A ninja has no sense of entitlement or dignity or flex time.

Meanwhile, the pirate is the entrepeneur, or maybe the upper-level executive. He has no sense of duty or honor. He seeks adventure and glory only. He’ll jump ship as soon as possible. He might even maroon his crew-mates on a desert island if it means he gets the treasure to himself.

Pirates love to hire ninjas because a ninja never disobeys. Ninjas love to kill pirates because they can pretend they’re killing their own pirate boss.