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Sadly, this wrap up will not include grilled veg­eta­bles, as the sand­wiches for lunch did.

Of course I first hit up the keynote as every one else did — the keynote from White Oak Tech­nolo­gies was ok — they pri­mar­ily out­lined why Python made them suc­cess­ful, and what didn’t go well for them including:

• Not enough peo­ple know python
• Few orga­ni­za­tion they con­sult to have python solutions
• Python “weird­ness” is a turn off to some
• Python is slow

Chris took each one of the straw men down in sub­se­quent slides — they used a lack of devel­oper who knew python to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between can­di­dates — best quote “No one uses python ‘by acci­dent’”. They also noted that on var­i­ous searches for python exper­tise, there were very few out there in 2001 — but those that were out there were very high quality.

As for the lack of solu­tions: They turned it into an advo­cacy plat­form, and used it (tak­ing a karma hit) to lock out com­peti­tors. Chris was quick to point out the lat­ter is bad — but given a lot of the other firms they com­pete with imme­di­ately wanted to go in and re-write any python they found — cus­tomers are noto­ri­ously skit­tish about re-writes.

He also men­tioned the fact that most of their clients are inter­ested in the fish — not the fish­ing pole (tool ver­sus output).

As for the weird­ness, it’s largely first impres­sions based on per­sonal pref­er­ences, and those that aren’t (no pri­vate vari­ables, pro­gram­ming errors mainly found at run­time) are not deal break­ers. In fact, in the case of the run­time errors brought forth by the latent typ­ing issue — it forced them to be more rig­or­ous in testing.

Finally, for python being slow — it keeps the dis­ci­plined in imple­men­ta­tion. Some prob­lems sim­ply don’t it a pure python solu­tion, and pick­ing the right tool for the job is a crit­i­cal skill.

Over­all, like I said — it was Ok. White Oak tech­nolo­gies can be found here.

Now, the next keynote was obvi­ously the one every­one wants to know about — namely Guido’s talk on Python 3000. Rather than try o do my own recap, Steve Holden did a fan­tas­tic sum­mary of the GuidoNote.

I’m still excited by Python 3000, and the slow tran­si­tion plan (in years, not months) includ­ing a python 2.6 and prob­a­bly a 2.7 release should assuage some peo­ple fears of seri­ous com­mu­nity shear.

After that — it was the talk free-for-all. I tried to con­sume (and failed) the talk by Travis Oliphant on the new buffer inter­face planned for python 3k — it’s so far out of my cur­rent domain (and skills) that I sim­ply could not drink from that fount.

I dropped in on “Data­base devel­op­ment with Jython, SQLAlchemy, and Hiber­nate” — the biggest take away from that being — Jython makes calls into java code such as JNDI and JDBC a breeze, and pythonic. I really do think based off Sun’s new found love for Jython, it will become a very seri­ous force in the com­mu­nity shortly. All in all, it was a good talk. (I also enjoyed the iPhone inter­fer­ence in the A/V equipment.)

Invari­ably — I hit up Brett Can­non’s talk on “How import does it’s thing” — with­out suck­ing up, I can hon­estly say it was a very clear, and con­cise overview of exactly what import does. I know I’m not alone on that based on hall­way con­ver­sa­tions. It was a great overview, and Brett’s one of the bet­ter pre­sen­ters here so far (in my opinion).

After that was Dr. Tim Couper’s talk: “Python ref­er­ences and prac­ti­cal solu­tions to reference-related prob­lems”. So far, this is on the top of all the talks I’ve been too. The pre­sen­ta­tion was amus­ing, and rich in con­tent. It was an excel­lent overview of how ref­er­ence account­ing is done in python and how to use weakrefs/etc. It was really a fan­tas­tic talk, I hope they upload the videos of these things some­place like youtube.

Then there was the “PyTri­ton: build­ing a petabyte stor­age sys­tem” by Jonathan Ellis. I think he’s a good pre­sen­ter, but it was rushed due to the short time slot. Sadly I can’t go into my thoughts on this one — it crosses the streams between PythonMe and WorkMe, I do have to say though — he doesn’t pull any punches when he has an opin­ion (see: threads) which I appreciate.

I fol­lowed that up with Brian Warner’s talk on “Tahoe: A Robust Dis­trib­uted Secure Filesys­tem” — again, I can’t cross the streams too much here, but I was sad-faced due to the lack of Python in the talk. It focused on the appli­ca­tion, not how python was used in it.

Next up was sup­posed to be “Like Switch­ing on the Light: Man­ag­ing an Elas­tic Com­pute Clus­ter with Python”, but hon­estly the pre­sen­ta­tion was poor, so I ducked out and switched to the High per­for­mance Net­work IO with Python + Libevent ” talk, which was really good, the Pyevent library looks quite com­pelling for net­work apps. I need to find the rest of my notes sadly.

I’d wrap up with the light­ning talks (which are always fun) but I mainly jot­ted down a series of URLs to fol­lowup on later.

Later on it was pizza, and blessed bed. Alto­gether a pretty good day — and a lot of great infor­ma­tion and dis­cus­sions with peo­ple in the halls and rooms. The sponsor/vendor rooms is hop­ping, and the recruiters are out en masse.

Hope­fully today I’ll be able to meet even more people!

Sadly, this wrap up will not include grilled vegetables, as the sandwiches for lunch did. Of course I first hit up the keynote as every one else did - the keynote from White Oak Technologies was ok - they primarily outlined why Python made them successful, and what didn't go well for them including: Not ...