Thanks to the nature of open source, almost anyone can write a programming language and get a significant number of people to use it: and plenty of people have.

Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, has been drawn into the coils of the Googleplex.

A spring 2005 survey of developers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa finds a dropoff in their use of those three languages.

Google’s embrace of the open source computing community is growing stronger and stronger. If you are a code junkie and would like to make some extra cash, Google may have just the thing for you.

Some commercial Web services software provides sophisticated Web services accounting features, recording details of Web services transactions recognized on the wire. But sometimes developers need accounting that is more modular, much more basic, and available on a shoestring. This article explains how to use advanced function composition tasks to add basic Web services monitoring capabilities.

One well-honed item in every sys admin’s toolbox is a preferred scripting language — maybe sh, or ksh, or Perl, or something more unusual, like Rexx or Ruby. I find Python so capable and easy to learn that in my consulting role at Phaseit, I tell newcomers it’s the best single language they can learn. Python spans a wider range of applications than any other language I know — even more than C or Java — and beginners pick it up quickly.

Perl folk seem not to like Python, at least not at first glance. It’s easy to understand why: the languages serve similar purposes, but have annoyingly different syntax and structure. There have been converts, though, and Eric S. Raymond’s experiences are probably not atypical.