This was my first PyCon after attending OSCON during the last two
years. PyCon was more about programming and more relevant to Chandler.
The keynotes were uninspiring except for Guido's "The State of Python",
which gave us a glimpse of upcoming Python releases. Python 2.5 will be
out in August. My favorite upcoming features incude: Exceptions will
finally become new style classes. Eventually all exceptions will be
derived from a common BaseException class. The new "with" statement
eliminates the need of a try/finally block to clean up resource
allocations. A try block will be able to contain both except and finally
blocks. Python programs will soon be able to take advantage of more than
2Gb of memory on 64 bit processors. New generator enhancements can be
used to implement coroutines. The integration of the new AST parse tree
will allow Python programs access to program parse trees. Now that Guido
is employed by Google and spending half time on Python, the language
seems to be evolving more quickly. Guido said that Python 2.9 will be
the last release before Python 3000. Phillip Eby has become an
increasingly important contributor to Python.
TurboGears and Django are two new Python projects, inspired by "Ruby on
Rails", aimed at easy AJAX application development. These projects
generated a huge amount of interest. I think we'll see giant improvement
in these frameworks over the next few years. I don't think it will be
long before reusable AJAX widget libraries are built which can be shared
by the different platforms, which "just work" on modern browsers, and
require little or no programming. I also don't think it will be long
before we'll see direct manipulation Interface builders built out of
AJAX widgets.
In my unscientific sampling of non-OSAF attendees, Grant's Zanshin talk
was the favorite. Overall, I think the OSAF talks were above average.
The sprints were more productive than last year. Jeffrey's vobject
sprint was a big success, however, only 2 people participated in the
other Chandler sprints. I worked on Macintosh performance. The take home
message so far is that Python runs about half as fast on a Macintosh
laptop than a Windows laptop. I hope to have more performance data soon.
On the second day we had a great schema evolution discussion with pje.
John
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