TN5250j is a 5250 terminal emulator for the AS/400 written in Java, which allows Python scripting!
(Well, Jython scripting, to be precise.)
This is going to be so useful...
Via Daily Python-URL
Ted Neward's 85 of 101 Reasons, Rebutted is a very thorough and non-partisan response to Carlos Perez's 101 Reasons Java is better than Dot-Net.
As I think I've said before, I'd like Java to stay better than .NET, but it's only going to do so by recognising where .NET has advantages, and stealing them. If Java can also steal good ideas from other arenas, then so much the better.
Via Dave Johnson
Want to read and write Word and Excel files from Java? Opening Microsoft File Formats to Java tells you how. Or at least some of how.
This article tells you how to use Apache POI to read the OLE 2 Compound Document format, which both Word and Excel use, but it doesn't tell you how to read the application specific structures.
Actually, I have always used Python for this kind of work. And since Word & Excel are installed on all the machines that I want to run my utilities on, COM automation (at which Python excels) was the obvious solution. Worked, too.
AMK's Perl 6 and Python 3000 is an interesting read.
The total Python re-write, Python 3000, definitely isn't going to happen. Joel says that you shouldn't re-write working software at all, but Python is being re-written. It's just that it's being re-written one piece at a time.
I particularly like Tim's line - The "ain't broke, don't fix" philosophy is a good guide here, provided you've got a very low threshold for insisting "it's broke" <0.4 wink>.