Development [LWN.net]

The 2007 Python Conference

PyCon 2007, the 2007 Python Language Conference, took place on February 23-25, in Addison, Texas.

PyCon is a community-oriented conference targeting developers of Python applications and the Python interpreter itself. The organizers aim to make the conference affordable and accessible to all.

PyCon gives you opportunities to:

see a variety of presentations, panels, and impromptu discussions.
learn about significant advances in the Python development community.
meet fellow developers from around the world.
participate in programming sprints with fellow developers.

PyCon 2007 may be one of the most blogged-about conferences yet. What follows is a collection of comments from members of the Python community describing conference highlights.

Python creator Guido van Rossum put together a PyCon 2007 Review: "I'm exhausted, but it's been a great week. The conference exceeded all my (and everybody else's) expectations, with a 40% attendance increase, excellent keynotes, and an incredible "buzz"."

Guido mentioned talks on IronPython, the One Laptop Per Child project, the keynote speeches, Python 2.6 and the state of the Python 3000 project (Python 3.0): "For me personally, this conference signified the coming together of the Python 3000 project (a.k.a. Py3k or Python 3.0). While in last year's keynote about this topic I mostly presented proposals, process, and plans, this year I could reveal many finished (as well as some unfinished or controversial) features, a concrete timeline with an alpha and a final release date (June 2007 and 2008, respectively), and, most importantly, a well-defined migration strategy." Guido has published some Video and Powerpoint Slides from his Python 3000 talk.

Jesse Noller says OLPC Has Excited me: "Many other people are blogging about it - but this morning opening Keynote by Ivan Krstić of the One Laptop Per Child project was easily one of the best keynotes/presentations I have ever seen. My view of the project has changed."

Grig Gheorghiu discusses the OLPC talk during PyCon day 1: "OLPC wants to change the way teaching and learning is done these days; they want to go back to the time when preschool kids interacted with each other by playing, and learned naturally peer-to-peer (as opposed to institutionalized teaching, which is one-to-many)"

Matt Harrison covered the Testing Tools Panel: "I've blogged about bugs and testing in open source previously, so I was quite interested in this panel. I was surprised because there was little discussion of code coverage, because I think it is quite important for dynamic languages to have good coverage. (I find that doctest and coverage.py not working together is a huge warning sign that people are ignoring coverage)."

Matt also had some Pycon2007 observations and thoughts: "Ubuntu appears to be the linux distro of choice now. I think I was the only one running a non-ubuntu linux (gentoo). This was quite surprising cause I met quite a few last year running Gentoo. (But since both make pretty liberal use of python I won't complain too hard). Only saw one Vista machine (Jim Huginin), but the rest seemed pretty evenly split among mac/xp/ubuntu. Draw whatever conclusion you want from that. It appears that a lot of companies are looking to hire python people, and are having a hard time finding them."

Richard Jones covers day 3 of the event: "I chaired a mixed-bag session which included some discussion on teching programming with Python and finished up with a cool web widgets library. I then had some more hallway BoF, practised my lightning talk and attended the women-in-IT talk. Anna had some really interesting things to day, as she's done a pretty good survey of the available literature on the subject. The main conclusion she came up with is "we don't know for sure" why the imbalance is there, but there's some really good theories. Top of the list is culture, both outside IT (women don't do programming) and inside IT (the geek/wizard culture)."

Ned Batchelder put together a Pycon blog: "I wasn't able to pay good attention to the web frameworks panel due to a crisis elsewhere, but from the testing tools panel: Chad Whitacre: "I'm addicted to dots." If you don't know what that means, you need to write (or run) more unit tests. Titus Brown: "I don't use test-driven development, I use stupidity-driven testing: when I do something stupid, I wrote a test to make sure I don't do it again.""

Spyced presents some PyCon SQLAlchemy tutorial slides. "My SQLAlchemy tutorial went pretty well for the most part. It was a fast pace but most people kept up pretty well. If I did it again I would add more of an intro to ORM in general for people who had never used one, but over half the attendees had used SO or django's or tried SA already."

The Voidspace Techie Blog covers the Python Community, Rails Community, Beautiful Code and the Testing Culture: "That aside, despite appreciating both languages, Andrzej feels that he learns more from the Ruby community. I mentioned earlier that Andrzej isn't a language zealot. He is a zealot for agile development techniques. What he appreciates about both Ruby and Python is that they are languages that assist and encourage in the production of beautiful and elegant code. He cares about the beauty of his code, ugly code offends him."

Brett Cannon PyCon 2007 Report: "After the keynote I do what I did last year, I ignored almost all talks and hacked. =) I decided I wanted to get my PEP 362 implementation finished before the sprints started (and I did; see the sandbox). It was interesting developing some code that is both 2.6 and 3.0 compatible. If you have a need for an object representation of a function/method signature then go ahead and grab the code."

Richard Jones covered the PyCon 2007 Game Sprint: "The "Game Sprint" has been about as disorganised as I'd expected. A few of us messed around writing games along the theme of "small" (with extremely loose interpretation ;). Mostly people used the exercise to learn pygame or PyOpenGL (or even in one case Python as well!) and write a game at the same time. Everyone seemed to have fun doing so, and there's now a few more people comfortable with the toolkits, which was the ultimate goal."

Titus Brown announced the new testing-in-python mailing list. "Catalyzed by the great fun we had at PyCon '07, Grig Gheorghiu and I have created the "testing-in-python" (or "TIP") mailing list. This list will hopefully serve as a forum for discussing Python testing tools, testing approaches useful in Python, Web resources for same, and whatever else people would like to talk about."

Glyph Lefkowitz is Recovering from PyCon: "One cool thing that I can shout from the rooftops already is that Guido, a group of concerned hackers, and I got to have a meeting of the minds, which Guido has already blogged about, addressing many upcoming concerns we all had about Python 3. That, and several other discussions with the responsible developers about the proposed transition plans for the 3.0 release have put my mind at ease."

Photographs of the event were been published by Jeremy Hylton and Grig Gheorghiu.

Lastly, Andrew Kuchling wrapped up the event with his PyCon wrapup and PyCon 2007 is over summary. "At-the-door registration was surprisingly stronger than we had been expecting, and the final attendance figure was 593 registered attendees, a 44% increase from 2006. The conference ran smoothly -- there were no disasters, only the odd oversight on our part or minor glitches."

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