Things that inspire envy of computer languages I don’t use
Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, JSP, etc. For web development, the languages themselves have certain strengths, but they also, eventually, acquire software projects that make them famous. Ruby, of course, has Rails, and through that, all the software of 37 Signals, and also Twitter. PHP, in the early days, was known for projects such as Phorum. Python is known for Zope and the Universal Feed Parser.
I’ve worked with Ruby a little and PHP a lot but I’ve never worked with Python. If I ever learn it, it will be so I can use Venus. Venus uses the Universal Feed Parser to pull in a variety of feeds, and it has a template engine that allows the input to be output in any format: HTML, RSS, Atom, etc.
Sam Ruby explains the role that the Universal Feed Parser plays:
It handles multiple feed formats, date formats, and ill formed feeds. Just one concrete example to illustrate the point: the author name can be obtained from one of eight different places in your feed; and the Universal Feed Parser even handles cases where people simply put names in place of email addresses or tack on names as comments after an email address.
It partially cleans the HTML. It uses SGMLLIB to clean up the tokens, then it removes unsafe constructs (like plaintext), and resolves relative URIs.