The third day's keynote is delivered by Greg Stein from Google. He gave some insight about evangelizing Python in his last few companies. Small companies are more readily to adopt Python and consider it a competitive advantage. Whereas large company would hold on until the support environment is present. Nevertheless he believes the growth of Python has passed the tipping point and it was never a problem to train any new programmer Python.
He went on to describe the use of Python in Google and emphasized SWIG as a great glue for integrating code build using various languages.
Andi Vajda, whom's search engine PyLucene is what powers my MindRetrieve project, is giving a talk in PyCon. He outlined the challenges to compile a Java application into C executable and making it into Python extension library using GCJ and SWIG. The issues including different memory management, different thread model and cross language error reporting. The success of PyLucene draw a lot of interests in compiling other Java projects into executable and provide more language binding.
I enjoyed yesterday's lightning talks so much that I have stepped up to demonstrate my own MindRetrieve project today. Again the room was packed. I'm glad that I went thought the 5 minutes presentation reasonably well and as at least a few people seems to appreciate my idea.
Geek biker Peter Kropf has made a cross country motorcycle trip. With the bike was a custom built hardware censors and cameras recording everything. He made his videos available on his website .
Chris Tismer shown a web demo using stackless Python to maintain server state. Stateless Python sounds like a mystery. But his few lines of code is a great introduction.
I thoroughly enjoyed this three days of PyCon, met lots of great people and learned a whole lot. I cherish this supportive open source community and look forward to more exciting development in the coming year.
Read more about day 1, day 2 and day 3 of PyCon.
2005.03.25 comments -