Simon Willison's Weblog: ned-batchelder

Quoting Ned Batchelder

2025-03-30T22:48:15+00:00

My advice about using AI is simple: use AI as an assistant, not an expert, and use it judiciously. Some people will object, “but AI can be wrong!” Yes, and so can the internet in general, but no one now recommends avoiding online resources because they can be wrong. They recommend taking it all with a grain of salt and being careful. That’s what you should do with AI help as well.

— Ned Batchelder, Horseless intelligence

Tags: ned-batchelder, ai

Quoting Ned Batchelder

2024-01-24T18:25:21+00:00

Find a level of abstraction that works for what you need to do. When you have trouble there, look beneath that abstraction. You won’t be seeing how things really work, you’ll be seeing a lower-level abstraction that could be helpful. Sometimes what you need will be an abstraction one level up. Is your Python loop too slow? Perhaps you need a C loop. Or perhaps you need numpy array operations.

You (probably) don’t need to learn C.

— Ned Batchelder

Tags: abstractions, c, ned-batchelder, programming, python

Quoting Ned Batchelder

2020-06-28T14:29:09+00:00

Here’s a common piece of advice from people who create things: to make better things, make more things. Not only does it give you constant practice at making things, but it gives you more chances at lucking into making a good thing.

— Ned Batchelder

Tags: ned-batchelder

Internet explorer mystery #1376

2008-12-03T09:04:17+00:00

Internet explorer mystery #1376

IE executes function definitions inside an “if (0)” block. That frightens me.

Tags: internet-explorer, javascript, ned-batchelder

280slides and Objective-J

2008-06-07T16:09:37+00:00

280slides and Objective-J

280 slides uses an Objective-C clone written in 13KB of JavaScript. I have to admit I’m completely baffled as to why you would want to use Objective C instead of JavaScript, but evidently it worked fantastically well for them.

Tags: 280slides, compiler, javascript, ned-batchelder, objective-c

Apache proxy auto-re-loader

2008-02-18T09:44:02+00:00

Apache proxy auto-re-loader

Neat trick: set your 502 (Bad Gateway) error document to include a meta refresh tag, automating the refresh needed should a server you are proxying to be temporarily unavailable.

Tags: apache, metarefresh, ned-batchelder, proxies

Http-https transitions and relative URLs

2007-10-18T11:57:47+00:00

Http-https transitions and relative URLs

Finally, a reason to use those weird protocol-relative URLs (//example.com/path and the like).

Tags: http, https, ned-batchelder, urls

Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots

2007-01-23T13:39:15+00:00

Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots

Ned’s analysis of how spambots work, along with some relatively simple tricks that should fool most of them.

Tags: commentspam, hashing, ned-batchelder, spam, spambots

Subversion branching quick start

2006-10-29T15:27:29+00:00

Subversion branching quick start

Ned Batchelder’s branching tutorial.

Tags: branching, ned-batchelder, subversion

Ned Batchelder: Css-discuss wiki

2005-02-02T20:23:28+00:00

Ned Batchelder: Css-discuss wiki

Ned says nice things about the Wiki.

Tags: css, ned-batchelder

Python Parsing Tools

2004-11-30T14:53:06+00:00

Python Parsing Tools

Ned’s compilation of Python parsing libraries.

Via Ned Batchelder

Tags: ned-batchelder, python

Ned Batchelder: A quest for pythonic interfaces

2004-11-10T01:03:20+00:00

Ned Batchelder: A quest for pythonic interfaces

More Ned on interfaces.

Tags: ned-batchelder, object-oriented-programming, python

Ned Batchelder: Interfaces

2004-11-10T01:03:05+00:00

Ned Batchelder: Interfaces

Ned on interfaces.

Tags: ned-batchelder, object-oriented-programming, programming

Code generation vs data driven programming

2004-02-11T05:39:05+00:00

Via Ned Batchelder, this interview with pragmatic Dave Thomas on code generation closely reflects my own nascent thoughts on the issue:

CGN: What do think the future is for code generation?

Dave: I think that in the long term the larger code generation efforts, the "application generators," will become a thing of the past. They are there because the underlying technologies and architectures don't yet support programming at a high level. But I'm betting that languages such as Java and C++ will in the long term be seen as a curious branch in the evolution of computing. I'm hoping that somewhere out there some bright spark is coming up with a way of letting us write applications expressively and dynamically. Once this happens, the need for these kinds of code generators will diminish.

For example, I rarely (if ever) write a code generator that generates Ruby code: there's just no need, as Ruby is dynamic enough to let be do what I want without leaving the language.

In the shorter term, though, I think code generators of all kinds will continue to contribute significantly to the industry. Java and C# are both such stifling languages that you need to be able to use code generators to make them effective.

We considered using code generators for our current major project at work, and picked up Jack Herrington's book on the subject. Reading through it, it became clear that many of the problems that code generators solve can be tackled instead using data driven programming techniques made possible by dynamic languages. Since we had already settled on Python as our implementation language the need for code generation became far less apparent, and we ended up avoiding it entirely with the exception of a command line tool for passively generating basic templates for our admin interface.

If I ever have to work with a less expressive language I'll certainly consider using a code generator (probably written in Python) to abstract away some some of the tedious repetition. As it is, Python's rich data structures and clean support for introspection provide an excellent alternative.

Tags: dave-thomas, django, ned-batchelder, programming, python

Ned Batchelder: Showing C header structure

2004-02-04T01:19:18+00:00

Ned Batchelder: Showing C header structure

Using Python to maked other languages less painful

Tags: c, ned-batchelder, python

Ned Batchelder: handyxml

2004-01-26T02:52:55+00:00

Ned Batchelder: handyxml

Yet another XML object wrapper for Python, this time with full DOM method support included

Tags: ned-batchelder, python, xml

A better definition of Metadata

2003-10-01T11:17:24+00:00

Ned Batchelder: Metadata is nothing new. Ned includes a far better definition of metadata than the standard "data about data" phrase:

Metadata is information about a thing, apart from the thing itself.

Ned also offers clear examples of metadata in the real world and shows how the concept goes back thousands of years. If you still don't quite understand what the term means you won't have any excuses once you've read his article.

Tags: metadata, ned-batchelder

Verbose Regular Expressions

2003-04-11T03:01:15+00:00

Ned Batchelder describes Verbose Python regular expressions. This is one of the things I've known about (as in known that they exist) for ages but have never got around to using. I've been working with some pretty heavy regular expressions recently that could really do with the clarity of being defined in verbose format with comments.

PHP also has support for verbose REs, thanks to the excellent pcre functions. Just use the 'x' modifier as explained on this manual page.

Tags: ned-batchelder, php, python, regular-expressions