Discovery Through Trial & Error

Today was the official start of PyCon 2008 in Chicago. The day started off pretty solid with a few interesting keynote speakers. The first keynote was by Chris Hagner from White Oak Technologies, Inc. Chris gave a good talk on ‘Why Python Sucks (But Works Great For Us)’. This talk gave a general outline of how WOTI uses Python, and has for quite a few years, and the difficulties they encounter from using Python. The biggest downfall Chris spoke of in using Python was speed. He spoke of writing a quick script in few lines of Python code for data mining purposes, and the overall processing time of the script. He compared this to a script written in C for the same purpose and demonstrated how in that scenario Python wasn’t the best option for White Oak. Although he noted a few areas where Python was lacking (for his line of work), his speech was overall pro-Python. It was very interesting to hear about the WOTI recruiting effort made for Python developers.

The second keynote was given by Guido van Rossum. Guido’s gave an overview of what the Python community should anticipate with Python 3000. The main changes Guido presented were the following:

• In Python 3k, print becomes a function. Ex: ‘print(a,b,file=sys.stderr)’
• Python 3k will distinguish between text and data. Ex: b”…” -bytes, “…”-unicode
• dict keys() returns a set view [+items()/values()]
• 1/2 will return .05
• there were a few more but these seemed to be the biggies.

Guido also spoke about Python 3000 adaption. He mentioned that in order for a developer to successfully move to Python 3000 two things must happen. 1) They must be ready and 2) They must make sure all dependencies work in 3k. Although Python 3k is closer than it was last year, I personally don’t anticipate too many people moving directly to it for a little while.

After the keynotes completed, it was off to the scheduled talks. Two talks I found particularly interesting were ‘Running a Successful Usergroup’ and ‘The State of Django’. ‘Running a Successful Usergroup’ was presented by Jeff Rush. Jeff outlined the key ingredients needed in order to create and maintain a successful usergroup. Jeff outlined creating a successful usergroup into 8 categories.

1. Steps to create a usergroup
2. Determining a usergroup type
3. Spreading the word
4. Usergroup resources
5. Finding a meeting place
6. To do @ meetings
7. Key elements for success
8. Risk of failure

Although this talk didn’t get into the inners of any particular Python module or framework, it was cool to see what it takes to get a usergroup up and running. I particularly liked finding out about all the resources available to usergroups such as mailing lists, wikis, chatrooms and O’Riely discounts.

‘The State of Django’ was the other scheduled talk I was impressed with. Adrian Holovaty gave an overview of what has happened to Django since PyCon 07, and what changes he anticipates will be made in the future for Django 1.0. I personally don’t work with Django but at work other groups use it heavily. I have seen first hand how Django can improve web development and that made hearing about the upcoming features exciting. Some of the cool new additions to come are:

• model validation
• model inheritance
• queryset_refactor – db API improvements
• newforms_admin

It looks like there will be a few talks tomorrow on testing. It should be another informative day. Check back tomorrow for updates from Day 2.