Simon Willison’s Weblog

Query Engines: Push vs. Pull (via) Justin Jaffray (who has worked on Materialize) explains the difference between push and pull query execution engines using some really clear examples built around JavaScript generators.

# 2nd May 2021, 2:49 am / databases, generators, javascript

Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers (via) David Beazley’s definitive generators tutorial from 2008, updated for Python 3.7 in October 2018.

# 9th April 2019, 5:13 pm / david-beazley, generators, python

Twisted inlineCallbacks and deferredGenerator. inlineCallbacks are a brilliant (but seemingly under-promoted) feature of Twisted which use the ability to return a value from a yield statement to make asynchronous callbacks look much more like regular sequential programming.

# 25th October 2009, 11:30 pm / async, callbacks, generators, python, twisted, yield

Diesel. Yet Another Asynchronous Python Comet Library, of interest because this is the first one I’ve seen that uses Python’s generator coroutines, taking advantage of the return value of the yield statement to feed messages in to a generator function. Currently only works on Python 2.6 on Linux due to a dependency on 2.6’s epoll support.

# 23rd September 2009, 5:15 pm / async, comet, diesel, generators, python

A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency. David Beazley’s sequel to last year’s mind-expanding “Generator Tricks for System Programmers”, perfect for if you’ve ever puzzled over what exactly you can use Python’s generator-based coroutine support for.

# 24th April 2009, 10:58 am / concurrency, coroutines, david-beazley, generators, python

Python + Hadoop = Flying Circus Elephant. Last.fm have released Dumbo, a Python module that lets you easily write Hadoop map/reduce tasks using Python and generators.

# 31st May 2008, 2:14 pm / dumbo, generators, hadoop, lastfm, mapreduce, python

Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers. The best tutorial on Python’s powerful generator feature I’ve seen anywhere.

# 24th April 2008, 10:17 am / david-beazley, generators, python