Thursday, August 26, 2004

Can you fly that thing? Not yet...

[republished 1 Dec 2004 from pycs.net]

Every once in a while I notice something that reminds me of a scene from a movie. Generally, if it's a movie that has made me think a bit or consider things in a new light (Fight Club, The Matrix, and Pulp Fiction are a few), it means there's something worth chewing on in the situation.

I'm no Matrix fanboy, but I had an experience that put me in mind of one scene. Neo asks Trinity if she can fly a helicopter. She answers, "not yet," calls up her "operator", and he transfer the appropriate skills to her virtual persona.

Today I wanted to check out something using the ctypes module, so I popped open an interpreter window and typed import ctypes. No dice--I didn't have it installed on my work machine. One quick download and install later, I uparrow+entered in the same interpreter (no restart here!),and had ctypes available. Not bad.

But this could get better. PyPI is gaining traction--it's not CPAN yet, but it seems to be turning a corner. Thinking in terms of yum and apt-get, what would be very cool is to turn this:

>>> import blahdb
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named blahdb
[switch to web browser, hit Google, find the right page, find the download
for my version of Python, download, find installer, run installer,
switch back to console]
>>> import blahdb
>>>

into this:

>>> import blahdb
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named blahdb
>>> install(blahdb)
PyPI: found blahdb (Library for accessing Blah databases)
PyPI: version 1.6 for Python 2.3
PyPI: <blah_author@python.org>: signature OK
PyPI: installed
>>> import blahdb
>>>

or even this:

>>> from __future___ import magic_imports
>>> import blahdb
>>>

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