Elpy 0.9 Released

I’m happy to announce that I just released a new version of Elpy, the Emacs Python Development Environment. You can find a list of news since the last release below.

Health Care Law (There, I Fixed It)

A while back I described the reasons on why universal health care is inevitable in a modern society. The main point therein is that we can not in a modern society let people die due to sickness simply because they are not rich enough to afford the appropriate health care. The question then becomes not whether society should pay in these cases, but how society can set up these payments to be as efficient as possible while not burdening any single member of the society overly much.

In this post, I’ll explain a health care system I would like to see in Germany, and one which I think would work well elsewhere, too.

Circe 1.1 released

Version 1.1 of Circe, the Client for IRC in Emacs, has been released.

Read more about Circe on its homepage: https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/circe/wiki

Circe is available from Marmalade.

Changes

• If a user leaves the channel and rejoins within a short time under the same nick, Circe will now remember the active/lurker state of that user.
• Circe now can also set a user as "lurker" again if they haven't been speaking for a while. This is disabled by default. See circe-active-users-timeout for more information.
• The heuristic to identify whether lisp symbol in the channel buffer is a function or a variable has slightly improved.
• The variable tracking-ignored-buffers allows functions in addition to regular expressions now.
• Newer versions of bitlbee are now supported out of the box.
• Additionally, there were various bugfixes.

Thanks to Taylan Ulrich B and John Foerch for their contributions. Circe wouldn't be where it is without you.

When Jokes Cross the Line

A while back, I heard someone say that rape jokes are important and we should not oppose them, because jokes are how we deal with traumatic situations. That sounded like an interesting argument, so I figured I’d think a bit more about it.

Book reviews now on goodreads.com

Just a quick heads-up, I have moved my book reviews over to goodreads.com, as I think they fit better there and have been disrupting the other posts in this blog from time to time anyhow. So if you want to follow my book reviews, check out my page there.

• My goodreads profile
• RSS feed of my goodreads updated

Monads for Normal Programmers (part 2)

The first part of this series generated a lot of responses, both very positive ones and very negative ones. I’m quite happy to accept that I just don’t understand monads very well, but so far, no one was able to convince me of that. One of the negative responses claimed it was not possible to actually implement monadic structures using my (simple) definition, which I took as meaning that the idea I was trying to convey was not very clear.

This second part of the series will show an application of the explanation I gave in the first part. I’ll start with a concrete problem and implement it in Python, slowly building up to the ideas encapsulated within monads. I assume you to have a good understanding of Python to be able to focus on the new concepts introduced.

Elpy 0.8 Released

I’m happy to announce that I just released a new version of Elpy, the Emacs Lisp Python Environment. You can find a list of news since the last release below.

Elpy is an Emacs package to bring powerful Python editing to Emacs. It combines a number of other packages, both written in Emacs Lisp as well as Python.

• Homepage
• Features
• Installation