Cog resurgence

Friday 14 January 2022

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.

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

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

Brett Cannon even called it trendy!

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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