Guido van Rossum delivered the State of Python keynote on the second day. First he mentioned a security issue in the Python standard library was reported recently. While the scope of this issue is limited, this has prompted the development team to setup a structure to response to future security problems. He then described some incremental improvement proposed. This is followed by some contentious "optional static type checking proposals". We can expect Python would continue its slow growth policy with few major change in coming releases.
I am missing more formal sessions because of the continuous discussion of web development in python. Shannon Behrens is giving a improvised tutorial of his Aquarium web framework to a user. Using this fairly straightforward framework he has covered the essence of web development within an hour. The Aquarium framework is comprised of mere a few thousands lines of code. This gave another perspective to the framework proliferation problem. Python is so productive that it is well within a single talented developer's capability to build a complete framework.
The open source movement give great opportunities to geeks to produce and contribute independently. But that could also leads to divergence is most apparent in Python's web development environment. A truly successful project will need not only technical excellency but also the ability to find consensus and to build coalitions.
Richard Jones has shown us the Roundup issue tracker. It seems to be well build and has rich functionalities. If you are starting a new project it is definitively an alternative to Bugzilla. Another similar project mentioned is trac with also has subversion integration.
PyCon has two sessions of Lightning talks make of of a series of informal 5 minutes presentations. This provides a low pressure environment and encourages people to show case smaller projects or ideas that might not warrant a full session. Given its unofficial nature I'm surprised to find the lightning talks is actually very well attended.
Armin Rigo has demonstrated a neat collect class that build a sequence from iterator on demand.
The Holger Krekel and Armin Rigo team has even more neat tools to show. The rlcomplete2 seems to be a must have command line completion tool. shpy enable people on two different computers to share screen and edit the same file simultaneous. That's what you call pair programming!
Wayne Yamamoto from Rustic Canyon Partners come to solicit talents to build startups base specifically on Python technologies. So far the Python community seems to be remarkably uncommercial. Many being merely closet Pythonistas. I think we really need to do more to let the larger world know how incredibly productive these Python technologies really are.
A few more sessions worth mentioning. Christopher Gillett from Compete Inc described the use of Python for large scale data mining. Michael Salib try to save all of us from the software patent machine. He has built a US Patent Database using Xapian as the search engine. Anna Ravenscroft shown us some important libraries dealing with date and time including Dateutil and pytz.
Read more about day 1, day 2 and day 3 of PyCon.
2005.03.24 - comments (0)
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