Monthly Archives: March 2014

Pony ORM

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I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about the internals of python until reading about
Pony ORM. This ORM allows one to query SQL databases using python-like syntax. For example:

select(p for p in Product)
select((p1, p2) for p1 in Product for p2 in Product if p1.name == p2.name and p1 != p2)
select((p.name, count(p.orders)) for p in Product)

There is a good explanation of how on StackOverFlow. Basically, PonyORM compiles the parameter to select (which is python code) using the python compiler and converts the python AST into SQL.

This blows my mind.

The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age

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Clay Shirky, a writer and professor at NYU, has a thought-provoking article on Higher Education. He points out a critical, but often ignored, problem.

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

He notes that the academy is itself a big part of the problem.

[The Golden Age] been gone ten years more than it lasted, in fact, and in the time since it ended, we’ve done more damage to our institutions, and our students, and our junior colleagues, by trying to preserve it than we would have by trying to adapt.

Read the whole article.