ACCU Conference (PyUK) 2005

[Michele Simionato]

This should go in a blog, but I do not have one, nor any intention to
start one, so I thought I will post here instead.

Warning: this is a long post!

ACCU Conference (PyUK) 2005: a personal view
=======================================================

Maybe not everybody knows that last week (19-23 of April) we had a
pretty important event in Oxford: the fifth PyUK conference - hosted
by the ACCU association - which is probably the second most important
Python-related event in Europe after EuroPython.

ACCU means Association of C and C++ Users, so most of the people there
were not Python programmers; still it amazed me how much steam Python
has gathered in the last years between C++ programmers.

Ideally, I was there to give just a short presentation on doctest,
but since Alex Martelli got hired from Google, I had to act as
replacement of the Martelli & Ravenscroft couple, since it not
that easy to find somebody crazy enough to take over or a 6-hours
guru-level Python course. And, of course, there was some Italian
mafia involved

It is not easy to act as a replacement for the martellibot,
especially on short notice, but I tried to do my best. BTW,
interested people can find my notes somehere on the ACCU website
https://www.accu.org/conference/ or on my site
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/python/oxford-lectures.zip

I was actually worried a bit about people deserting the lectures once
they discovered that Alex & Anna where not coming; it turns out my
worries were injustified. We actually had something like 20 persons
there, so we filled the room pretty well.

The interesting thing was that at least half the people were
experienced C++ programmers willing to learn Python, and not actual
Python programmers. So, I had to correct the scope of the lectures
in real time and I could not cover metaclasses, whereas I covered
decorators but not as well as they deserve. Next year the tutorial will

probably have a title such as "Python for C++ programmers" and the
program
will be changed accordingly. Anyway, people were extremely interested
and the session (originally scheduled to end at 4 PM) actually
went go until after 6 PM!

It turned out that one of my "students" was Stephen Turner from
Microsoft:
Steve's title is "Developer evangelist" and it is part of his job to
present to the developers the new cool projects Microsoft is working
on:
in this particular case, he went to the course since he in charge
of evangelizing Jim Hugunin's brainchild, IronPython, i.e. Python
running (fast!) on Dot Net, and he wanted to have a good picture
of CPython capabilities.

Obviously when I discovered that, I immediately asked him if he was
willing to give a presentation on IronPython. We were lucky, since he
accepted, he got some slides from Jim Hugunin's PyCON presentation
and he gaves us a truly wonderful demonstration of IronPython
capabilities. *Really* impressive.

One cannot overrate the importance of this development for the future
of Python. I asked Steve if Microsoft plans to support IronPython as
part of the DotNet choice of languages: the answer was that there is no
intention to sell IronPython. IronPython is an OpenSource project based
on DotNet but it is not part of the DotNet offer and there are no
plans in this sense.

Some of you may be surprised (I certainly was) but Microsoft has been
financing various Open Source projects in the last few years, released
under BSD-style licences. IronPython is just one of these projects.
There will probably be more. So stay tuned and keep an eye on what
Redmont
is doing. What it clear is that now Microsoft knows about the existence
of
Python and it is actually investing money on it.

This is quite a change, especially with respect to what our keynote
speaker, Greg Stein, told us about his experience with Microsoft
7-8 years ago, when he was employed by them: at that time Microsoft's
reaction to Python was something along the line of "Python what? is
that a programming language?".

Greg also told has about the programming language policy at Google
(his current) employer: Googles uses and acknowledges officially only
three mainstream languages: C++, Java, and Python. Python *is*
mainstream
for them. And judging from the space accorded to Python at the ACCU
conference,
Python is mainstream for the ACCU members too.

An extremely impressive accomplishement for Python, if you think about
it. And if Microsoft and Google are not enough, know that Nokia
is offering Python on their mobile phones. Tapio Tallgren gaves us an
extremely interesting technical talk on how you can program the
Series 90 mobile using Python. They are targetting Python 2.2
and most of the standard library just works, the speed is pretty
good and actually they were surprised of how easy was to make the
port.

All in all, pretty good news, people! It seems a pretty good moment
to be a Python programmer!

I have something else to say, but I will make another post for that.

Michele Simionato

 

[Michele Simionato]

The previous post was getting too long, so I decided to put my
impressions on the technical talks here. You may also want to
read what our chairman Andy Robinson has to say:
http://www.reportlab.org/~andy/accu2005/accu2005.html
There you can find the materials of the conference (slides etc.)

ACCU Conference (PyUK) 2005: a personal view (part 2)
=======================================================

I am definitely a technical person (as opposed to a marketing person)
so what impressed me the most were the presentations by Armin Rigo.

He gave two presentations: the official one, about the PyPy project,
and
a lightening talk about greenlets. Of course, I had heard something
about these topics previously, but it is pretty different to see a live
demonstration. Armin shown us really *impressive* stuff.

Basically, PyPy is already there and it is working! He explained us
the idea behind just-in-time compilation (which is actually quite
simple),
type inference at work, as well as other really impressive stuff, such
as sharing an object through an Internet connection (!)

The only problem with PyPy as it is now, is that it runs on top of
traditional Python and it is terribly slow. Nevertheless, Armin says
that it can be made fast and actually faster than current Python.
If any other guy would have made the same claim I would have been
skeptical, but Armin is the person who gave us Psyco, so I am forced to

take him seriously. And the other persons working full time on the
project have names such as Christian Tismer, Samuele Pedroni,
Holger Krekel, etc. As reported by Jacob Hallen, Guido himself has
great hopes for the project and Tim Peters would have liked to work
full time on PyPy.

The European Community founded the project for 1,300,000+ Euros in two
years. So there is money to join the project and to cover travel
expenses,
if you are an Europen citizen. If you are no EU member,
things are more complicated from the burocratical point
of view. If somebody knows how to turn around the
restrictions and to get some money for non-EU nationalities,
I am sure Jacob Hallen would be happy to know.

Jacob Hallen is in charge of the organization of the
sprints and of some of the burocratical part. He looks
like he is doing a pretty good job. Of course his firm,
the Strakt, has a very strong and direct interest in the
project. It is worth repeating that Alex Martelli worked for Strakt,
that Laura Chreighton is there as well, and that recently
they hired Samuele Pedroni of Jython fame. So, it looks
like they are really doing a LOT for Python in Europe.

On my part, I have resolved to keep a close eye on the
development in http://codespeak.net, since there is really
cool stuff in there, and really innovative ideas. It is
unfortunate that most of the stuff is still under SVN
and not easy available to the average Joe User, even if
there are plenty of things that would be useful to the average
Joe User, such as py.test (I would not talk about py.test since
it has been discussed elsewhere pretty well, but I definitely
like it a lot).

I certainly hope that part of this very substantial effort will go back

into the standard library someday.

It is interesting to notice that Armin and I were the two speakers to
use non-traditional presentation materials.

Whereas I have just shown simple HTML slides generated by a hand-cooked
Python script, he made a very effective usage of Pygame, so you
got the impression type inference was as easy as playing PacMan.
His presentation is available for download, at the reportlab link
I mentioned before, so everybody can see it. Armin also used GraphViz
to
plot the output of PyPy type-inferencer (I am not sure of the right
term
to use here, just as I am not sure of what "interpreter" and "compiler"
means anymore) and he got really nice-looking results. I am a
known evangelist of the "dot" language,
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/05/06/graphviz_dot.html,
so I very much liked the approach.

It is also fun to notice that both Armin's and my talk were
the two metacircular talks of the conference: Armin was talking about
implementing a programming language using itself as implementation
language (let me remind that PyPy stands for Python in Python) whereas
I presented a web application to demonstrate doctest which was used to
doctest itself.

Well, that's all for the moment. I have written enough for today, now
it is time to start playing with greenlets. They are extremely cool,
I don't know where I want to use them yet, but I am pretty sure I'll
figure out something eventually


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