Ned Batchelder: Cog resurgence

My cog tool has been having a resurgence of late: a number of people are discovering it’s useful to run a little bit of Python code inside otherwise static files.

It took cog 17 years to become an overnight success :)
(first posted Feb 2004: https://t.co/Zmtrdy0by9) https://t.co/DON9THZ5wh

— Ned Batchelder (@nedbat) November 22, 2021

Hynek Schlawack used it to de-duplicate his pyproject.toml:

As a test balloon, I’ve switched structlog from https://t.co/PihDrIF58S to flit w/ pyproject.toml in combination with @nedbat’s cog to maintain some deduplication. I think I like it! Sharp tools that do one thing well FTW.https://t.co/w2RM4Ckyke

— Hynek Schlawack (@hynek) November 17, 2021

Automator extraordinaire Simon Willison started using it to keep docs up to date:

I’ve been solving so many documentation problems with @nedbat’s cog tool recently - it’s fantastic for keeping documentation automatically up-to-date, in Markdown or rST)

Here’s a new page of sqlite-utils docs showing --help for every CLI command! https://t.co/Dwef9p2h8P pic.twitter.com/8tyfyfe7AT

— Simon Willison (@simonw) January 11, 2022

Brett Cannon even called it trendy!

A quick, public thanks to @nedbat for creating Cog; I did the “trendy” thing and used Cog to automate the README for the Python Launcher for Unix (instead of using my home-grown solution). Makes editing the README simple again!https://t.co/F5jnqgW7cG

— Brett Cannon (@brettsky) December 31, 2021

Of course, some people were using it before it was cool.

With all this buzz(!), Tobias Macey invited me on podcast.__init__ to talk about it: Episode 347: Generate Your Text Files With Python Using Cog. It was fun to talk about this little tool I wrote nearly 18 years ago that has been plugging away all this time, and is now being re-discovered.

Even I am finding new uses for cog. I started using it to keep coverage.py docs up to date, I built my crazy over-engineered GitHub profile (source) with it, and I even used it on the source file of this blog post to pull in the tweets!

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