Hi All, Here are some notes from yesterday's meet-up. Apologies for any omissions. Perhaps you can reply to this message if I've missed anything out ...
In attendance were Daily, Dave P, David J, Lawrence, Rob, Safe, Simon and Tom. Attendees came from as far and wide as Manchester, Stoke (via triangular route from Liverpool) and Sheffield. As expected, a wide variety of topics was discussed. After Tom denied accusations of being a Ruby programmer (twice and independently) we got down to business: * Dave P asked who amongst us wrote Python for a living. There were a couple of tentative nods around the group. Dave P later lamented that he's employed to write English rather than code. * Lawrence stated that he'd like an offline searchable Streetwalking application for his Android device. Dave J wondered whether he could port his Java based mobile phone programming language to Android's dalvik JVM. * Rob described how he'd purchased a Roomba clone vacuum cleaner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roomba) on eBay, pulled out the vacuuming innards and repurposed it as a robot complete with camera and processor courtesy of an O2 Joggler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_Joggler). * We discussed whether the stereotype of the Zope programmer being indifferent to Python and the Python community was correct and whether this was also beginning to happen in the Django community (as Tom said had happened in the Ruby on Rails community). * Pythonic books were brought by David J (Bioinformatics Programming using Python), Simon (Python Pocket Reference) and Safe (Pro Django, Natural Language Processing with Python). David J stated that he was planning to become a biologist in a couple of weeks and gave us a potted history of the Human Genome Project and the sort of data processing done (badly) by the modern day biologist. * David J showed surprise that even though he was working with 64-bit machines back in the 90's, the move to 64-bit on the desktop was only now in full swing. He and others suggested that this was due to (a) Intel's unsuccessful initial foray into 64-bit with the Itanium, (b) Microsoft stalling with 64-bit Windows, and (c) the move to web based services where more processing happens away from the desktop. * Lawrence regaled us with a history of Zope and talked of Zope 2, Zope 3, Plone, Grok, BlueBream and BFG. He noted that BFG is probably the platform he'd choose for new projects and that BFG is an acronym "Big Friendly Giant" (depending on who you speak to). * Safe chatted about Electronic Medical Records and how he felt the current crop of medical history recording applications looked too much like front-ends to Microsoft Access. He said that check-boxes and drop-downs were too far removed and far less efficient and expressive what the medical professional does with paper records. He also mentioned that he was entering PyWeek and wondered who else might be entering too. * We were less than complimentary about Perl 6. Simon asked the sensible question as to why Perl 6 wasn't implemented independently of writing a brand new virtual machine for it to run on. There were no good answers (though there was talk of a Haskell implementation of Perl 6). * It was noted that it was difficult to find Perl, Java Swing and APL programmers. * Book recommendation: Dave P enjoyed dipping into "Organisational Patterns of Agile Software Development". It came with the health warning that he enjoyed dipping into it rather than reading it from cover to cover. * Languages mentioned during the evening include: Perl, C, C++, Java, Javascript, Haskell, APL, Lua ... and Python! * Finally, we discussed the next meeting. Those present were generally mild to moderately indifferent about the Rain Bar as the venue. We agreed to hold the next meeting at a pub up the road called The Britons Protection, a venue felt to have quieter music and tastier beer. In the meeting after next we'd aim to hold talks / presentations there if possible. Unless it clashes with other geek events in the area, we'll continue to hold Python Northwest meetings on the third Thursday of the month. Next meeting is Thursday 16th September at 6pm. Put it in your calendars! Cheers, Safe -- To post: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] Feeds available at http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds For more options: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west
