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Ugh, this hotel is dry. So dry. I woke up and wanted to lay in a tub of water just to recon­sti­tute myself.

Of course, given it’s been rain­ing in Dal­las, and last night when Jack and I walked to din­ner, we got tsunami’ed by a Saab, I shouldn’t be com­plain­ing too loudly.

So, this morn­ing, we’re start­ing of with GvR’s keynote about the state of Python, this should be inter­est­ing as I am really keen on see­ing where the lan­guage as a whole is going to be going.

Well, wrap­ping up the school bus parked in my brain, and before I get into too many details, Guido basi­cally cov­ered some new inter­est­ing things (move to SVN, Build­Bot) and then cov­ered a lot of the “what’s new in python 2.5″ stuff.

You should read AMK’s main­tained page here: What’s New in Python 2.5

While not fully up to date, it still cov­ers some of the more inter­est­ing bits, including:

• absolute/relative imports
• Con­di­tional Expressions
• Try/Except/Finally
• gen­er­a­tor enhancements
• with State­ments

… And much more. (includ­ing a new hash lib!). The talk was very good, dry, but good (I mean, we’re at a pro­gram­ming conference).

I tried sit­ting in on the Imple­men­ta­tion of the new AST byte­com­piler talk — but I was fool­ing myself if I thought I would under­stand any of it. I can be smart, but I’m not that good yet. (I don’t know if I will ever be that good).

The Iron­Python meet­ing is inter­est­ing. For those of you who don’t know, Iron­Python is an imple­men­ta­tion of the Python lan­guage in the .NET Com­mon Lan­guage Inter­face). This means you can run, and com­pile Python appli­ca­tions within .NET.

Now from my PoV, I see this as a nice thing that might allow me to manip­u­late win­dows in an auto­mated fash­ion using rel­a­tively com­mon Python code. Watch­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion, the imple­men­ta­tion they have made is amaz­ingly pow­er­ful, and I see a lot of poten­tial in it. Well — for Win­dows peo­ple, given I’m exclu­sively on Linux/Mac, I can see the ben­e­fits in an abstract/testing sense.

I spoke to the pre­sen­ter briefly, and he noted that IP is a lit­tle raw cur­rently (duh) but would shine when test­ing .net applications.

The rest of the after­noon is a bit of a blur, the light­ning talks were, well, fast (and of mid­dling return to my work). But one thing stood out for me — py.execnet (ad-hoc net­works). I am going to have to look at this (http://codespeak.net/py/) when I get back. Edit: Also, Twill looks awe­some, I need to grok more twill and roll it out to inter­nal users.

I also went to the py2exe pre­sen­ta­tion, but it didn’t cover ground I didn’t already know, and I also went to the Eggs pre­sen­ta­tion Ian Bick­ing did, it really good from my PoV as it cleared up some mis­con­cep­tions I had. How­ever, the room was packed, and I think Ian was ner­vous. Pretty good however.

Then I tried to attend the AST BoF meeting.

The anal­ogy I used after­wards (note I said “try”) was that I felt like I was in a room filled with rocket sci­en­tists, but I was the Jan­i­tor. Almost every­thing they said ric­o­cheted off my brain and then shot into the stratosphere.

That being said, it was intim­i­dat­ing being in a room with the likes of Guido, Jeremy Hyl­ton and Brett Cannon.

After the light­ning talks, it was off to Nerd­books for the book buying/signing. I ended up get­ting the new ref­er­ence book and twisted book. I luck­ily got the ref­er­ence book signed by both the author, and GVR.

It was a good day over­all, and I picked up some things, but I have to do a braindump/postmortem and send some seri­ous sug­ges­tions to the orga­niz­ers about con­tent. I’m dis­ap­pointed about a few things.

I’ll post pic­tures when I get back to Boston.

Ugh, this hotel is dry. So dry. I woke up and wanted to lay in a tub of water just to recon­sti­tute myself. Of course, given it’s been rain­ing in...