I got into a spat with Eric Raymond the other day about some code he's written called ForgePlucker. I took a look at the source code and posted saying it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer. Raymond replied by posting a blog entry in which he called me a poor fool and snotty kid. The problem with writing code like ForgePlucker is maintenance. It's got all sorts of little assumptions and special cases. A much better approach is to use an HTML parser than knows all about the foibles of real HTML. Here's the equivalent function written using the BeautifulSoup parser:

This PEP proposes a temporary moratorium (suspension) of all changes to the Python language syntax, semantics, and built-ins for a period of at least two years from the release of Python 3.1. In particular, the moratorium would include Python 3.2 (to be released 18-24 months after 3.1) but allow Python 3.3 (assuming it is not released prematurely) to once again include language changes.

Want to use Spring but don't want to use Java? Spring for Python is an Inversion of Control container for Python with several additional features such as aspect oriented programming. To learn more read on.