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Some quick thoughts and notes on Saturday at PyCon that turned into not-so-quick notes as I started writing them…

I was initially excited that Adele Goldberg was giving the day’s first keynote (I’m a bit of a PARC fanboy, really enjoyed Dealers of Lightning), but sorely disappointed that an hour of hearing a lot about the current state of public schools and computers in public schools that I was already aware of turned into what felt like an advertisement for what amounts to been-there-done-that educational software (now with ZJaxian pizzaz!). Too bad. (Plus she cited the NYT article about the “scrotum” controversy which is a dubious source due to some (IMO) highly questionable journalistic practices.)

“Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites” felt strangely like a time warp back to the presentation that David Stanek and I did last year, but with slightly less management-imposed hand waving. A very weird experience.

The testing tools panel likewise didn’t manage to deliver any earth-shattering insight into testing, but did provide plenty of good laughs, and makes me wonder when we’ll start seeing some of the panelists in rehab for “dot addiction.”

Guido’s lunchtime keynote skipped any discussion of the current state of Python, and instead dove into a preview of what’s coming up in Python 3(000), the first alpha of which is due this summer. Some stuff seems really good (print as a function, dictionary views, string and bytes, the int/long unification, division, absolute imports, and the exception changes), some things seem intriguing and mildly weird (string formatting, set literals and set comprehensions), and some things seem downright bizarre and possibly awful–specifically the keyword-only parameter syntax, which at first glance looks like a horrible typo. Luckily the (IMO unnecessary) switch/case stuff was put to a vote on the spot and soundly vetoed, so it looks like it will (thankfully) not end up happening.

Google uses two-space indents. Make of that what you will. (I am a recovering 2-space indenter, now greatly preferring 4-space.)

Serving soup to a ballroom full of laptop-toting geeks seems like an inherently bad idea…

I very much enjoyed Dan Milstein’s talk on “Embedding Little Languages in Python” which illustrated some great ways to turn friendly little DSL’s into very clean and well-structured, declarative Python code. I’ll definitely be grabbing a copy of his slides.

Likewise, I thought Aaron Bickell’s soaplib was a hit, reminding me of Python’s xmlrpclib on the client/server proxy side, and a bit of CherryPy/TurboGears on the server side. And it’s a lot like TGWebServices, so that’s cool too–multiple brains converging independently on a similar solution means it’s probably a pretty good approach.

My presentation went pretty well, although I was definitely rushing to get through all of the essentials. The palpable sense of relief when it was complete was quite amazing. I got some good questions and several compliments throughout the afternoon, so that felt pretty darn groovy.

I went to an open space talk where Ian Charnas and Brian Beck from the Case contingent of ClePy showed off Pagoda, an open-source CMS built on top of TurboGears. Looks nifty; this should be a project to watch.

Saturday’s lightning talks included some significant gems: Kevin’s TGWebServices talk had some amusing Java/SOAP zingers; the tale of using Python on a Series 60 to map cell phone towers as a “poor man’s GPS” was charmingly entertaining; a quick hit on the state of Python in Japan won our hearts; and Ian Bicking’s Zjangogears brought down the house with laughter. Awesomeness all around!

I missed the OLPC demo session last night, opting instead to join up with a dinner group (Kevin, Mark, and Karl from TG, a bunch of ClePy people, Bruce Eckel, and some new names and faces that are presently eluding me). Dinner was followed by a whole bunch of standing around in the hall talking, which evolved into hanging out at the bar enjoying beer and code with ClePy people, and eventually the EWT party up on the twelfth floor. I gave in to my exhaustion at left the party around one… I’m sure it kept going for quite a while.

I’ll save my thoughts about today’s activities for another post, once I have time to digest it.

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