Hi All, Thursday's Python Northwest talks meeting saw us return to MadLab. This month we were on the first floor sandwiched between Christmas revellers both above and below us! In attendance were Daley, David J, Ed, Flo, Martin and Safe.
Talks: Martin Dunschen: Fixing leaks in CPython. While working with embedded Python, Martin found a memory leak in CPython peculiar to the loading and unloading of DLL's on Windows. Worryingly, he noted that there was evidence of leaks elsewhere in the CPython codebase which would affect all platforms. Martin described his fix which involved using C++ whereas CPython is (currently) written in pure C. Safe Hammad: The Zen of Docstrings. What do you do if you want to "get it right" as far as docstrings are concerned? PEP 8 is quite prescriptive about how Python should be written, and the Zen of Python encapsulates what it is to be "Pythonic" (try "import this" on the command prompt). Is there an equivalent for docstrings? Safe set out to explore. David Jones: My favourite function. A talk about his favourite function in his third favourite module: itertools.groupby. The documentation suggests that itertools.groupby should be used on sorted data, but with the help of peptide sequence data for the translucent zebrafish (Danio rerio), he showed novel uses of itertools.groupby where this wasn't necessarily so. N.B. A top tip is to read the "Recipes" section of the itertools documentation. Many thanks to all the speakers! After talk discussion: - We spent some time staring at the TIOBE Programming Community Index. Naturally we compared and contrasted languages, and along the way, we marvelled at the rise in the popularity of Python and noted a few surprises too http://bit.ly/cuwptY - The subject of ticketing systems came up with mentions of the open source Bugzilla and Trac in addition to hosted services such as Bitbucket, Github and Google Code. (David has found that Bugzilla is often used by non-programmers as a ticketing system). Ed mentioned there was a ticketing system which worked by being checked in within a git repository itself. (Name unknown). - Safe was unhappy with his distributed SCM workflow specifically when working with a ticketing system like Trac. Flo mentioned a good back-to-basics guide by Joel Spolsky on Mercurial: http://hginit.com/ - Daley announced the formation of a new Sheffield Python Group. First meet is 25th Jan 2011. - Safe to investigate setting up a Python Northwest wiki. - January to be a Code Dojo and February to be a talks meeting. Thoughts for January's meeting include working through The Python Challenge ( http://www.pythonchallenge.com/) or Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/ ). All the best, Safe Safe Hammad http://safehammad.com -- To post: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] Feeds: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds More options: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west
