We Are Team Rubber

I am blogging this from the sunny city of Vilnius, Lithuania - the setting for this year’s Europython - straight after Guido’s keynote talk on Python 3000 (via teleconference, and at the end of the day due to the 10 hour time difference).

I’ll definitely say that I have really enjoyed the first day of the conference - especially Harald Armin Massa’s “Discouraging the use of Python” - a tongue-in-cheek look at different ways that “crafty developers” try to sneak Python into software companies, and ways to counter-act them. Here was my favourite example:

Developer:

“With Python, you have to write a tenth amount of the code as with C”

Why this is to be avoided:

“Less code means less programmers, less man-hours spent on your project, and a lower expenditure, which means that as a manager you will end up with a parking space further away from the office - stop it at all costs.”

I also went to two very interesting talks on PyPy, an interpreter for Python (and more) that would take more time to describe than I have now (and more than most would be willing to read through). It was great to be able to ask the developers some questions, and according to their first talk, we should expect production ready PyPy in between 6 and 12 months.

I also enjoyed the talk on “Building an App in a week” - a talk tailored at hacking together a django web site in very fast iterations - with some great tips, mainly under the heading “avoid doing work at all costs”.

If there is one slight problem I would complain about, it is that the wireless network here doesn’t seem to have been prepared for this many developers to all turn up at once with our IRC, email and ssh connections all running constantly during the talks. I heard one person complain that it was taking him 45 seconds to load the Google homepage - but amazingly Guido’s talk seemed to come through fine.

Signing off for now,

Tim