Summary
My impressions of the Python Conference 2007 in Dallas, Texas, written up on the plane home while it was still fresh in my mind.
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I'm writing this on the plane back home from Pycon. I'm exhausted,
but it's been a great week. The conference exceeded all my (and
everybody else's) expectations, with a 40% attendance increase,
excellent keynotes, and an incredible "buzz".
Apart from the keynotes I didn't see many presentations, but I heard
that there were many great ones. Pretty much the only talk I attended
was Jim Hugunin's talk where he showed the progress of the IronPython
project. (Ironpython is Jim's Python implementation for Microsoft's
CLR platform, which he created as an open source project before he
joined Microsoft, and is now developing with a small team as one of
the few open source projects at Microsoft.) The wizard Merlin was
thankfully absent; his place was taken by a much more interesting
demo, where Jim controlled a Lego robot via a Python script.
IronPython 1.1 beta has been released; it features Python 2.4
compatibility, plus partial 2.5 compatibility enabled by a
command-line switch.
Friday morning's keynote speaker Ivan Krstic gave an overview of the
non-profit One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to produce a
hundred million laptops at a cost of $100 a piece, to be distributed
to children ages 6 and up in poor countries (with the cooperation and
at the expense of participating countries). The first laptops (for
relatively small trial projects in places like Brazil and I believe
Thailand) are expected to ship this August. The project, started at
MIT and with many industry partners (including Google), combines
existing and custom hardware and software components into an
educational platform, dubbed the XO. While some of the XO's hardware
is proprietary, all the software is open source -- the basis is formed
by a stripped down version of Linux (based on Red Hat's Fedora), on
top of which they are developing a new GUI and window manager written
in Python, and educational applications also written in Python. The
XO's hardware design focuses on extreme ruggedness, reliability, and
low power consumption; the expectation is that there will be no
realistic way to service the laptops in the field, and the environment
will often be harsh: temperatures up to 50 degrees Celcius, and
irregular (and often absent) power sources.
Krstic gave away a few computers (the result of an early production
test run), and I was one of the lucky recipients. I'll probably frame
it and hang it on the wall; a bug in the mouse pad firmware causing it
to omit some "up" packets makes it pretty hard to use (this will be
fixed in the next production run of course). It's definitely no
competition for today's commercially available laptops (which are 10x
the price). Almost everything about it is small: the keys (just right
for children's little fingers), the screen (plenty of resolution
though, and dual-mode for viewing in bright daylight), the memory (120
MB on my copy, half that for the final product), and the flash disk
(500 MB). The processor runs at less than 400 MHz. On the plus side,
it runs a full Linux kernel with many utilities available, has
self-configuring WiFi wireless, three USB slots, a camera, microphone,
stereo speakers, audio in/out ports, and (once they tune the power
management) it is expected to run for 22 hours on one battery charge.
It weights less than a kilo!
The software is far from finished. An early version of the GUI and
window manager are available, and a few small demo applications: chat,
video, two games, and a web browser, and that's about it! The plan is
to write all applications in Python (except for the web browser), and
a "view source" button should show the Python source for the currently
running application. In the tradition of Smalltalk (Alan Kay is on
the OLPC board, and has endorsed the project's use of Python) the user
should be able to edit any part of a "live" aplication and see the
effects of the change immediately in the application's behavior. (A
versioned document store will make it possible to roll back disastrous
changes.) This is where Krstic wants my help: he hopes I can work
magic and implement this feature for Python. I got started right away
during the conference, with a reimplementation of python's reload()
function that can patch classes and functions in place. Even this
small component still has a long way to go; a checkpoint of the work
in progress is checked into subversion as part of the Py3k standard
library. That's not where the rest of my OLPC work will show up; they
use GIT for source control, so I will get to learn that.
The keynotes had a strong educational theme: on Saturday morning Adele
Goldberg gave a passionate plea for improvements to the USA's
educational system. 40 years ago, US education was #1 in the world;
today it is #19. The public school system is stuck in a complete
political gridlock; changes are nearly impossible to make due to the
many constraints imposed on schools by federal regulations, fearful
and litigious parents, bullying, lack of funds, and many other
depressing factors. It also seems that most uses of computers in the
classroom have turned into disasters: the well-meaning geeks behind
many school computer experiments don't understand the situation in the
average classroom. For example, computers show up without sufficient
power, are likely to be stolen, or locked up in a safe rather than
being used! Schools are in total fear of the internet, which is seen
as a source of pornography and influences of the devil. I hope Adele
will put her slides on line, there was much interesting data.
On Sunday morning Robert Lefkowitz entertained us with a literate
history of literacy throughout the ages, and (as is his habit) more
questions than answers.
For me personally, this conference signified the coming together of the
Python 3000 project (a.k.a. Py3k or Python 3.0). While in last year's
keynote about this topic I mostly presented proposals, process, and
plans, this year I could reveal many finished (as well as some
unfinished or controversial) features, a concrete timeline with an
alpha and a final release date (June 2007 and 2008, respectively),
and, most importantly, a well-defined migration strategy. Migration
was also the topic of several heated discussions I had at the
conference, for example with a group of Twisted developers (lead by
Glyph Lefkowitz and moderated by Steve Holden) about the best way to
approach the transition for a project like Twisted, which is bound to
support several different Python releases (currently 2.3, 2.4 and
2.5). The best strategy will be to start by adding 2.6 to the list of
supported versions when it comes out, and then gradually drop support
for older releases and add support for 3.0. Using 2.6 (to be release
around April 2008, i.e. before 3.0) will be key for this strategy.
Python 2.6 will contain various compatibility features, such as
optional run-time warnings when a feature is used that will be dropped
or changed in 3.0, as well as the ability to import certain 3.0
features from the future (e.g. from __future__ import dict_views,
which Thomas Wouters has already implemented in a branch). Once a
program is warning-free in 2.6, a source-to-source translator that
recognizes syntactic constructs but doesn't do type inferencing or
data flow analysis can be used to translate it to 3.0 syntax, and
there will be a good chance that it runs correctly under 3.0, although
still not quite as good as when moving code unchanged between 2.x and
2.(x+1). The recommended development mode is then to develop under
2.6, and on a regular basis do the automatic conversion to 3.0 syntax
and test under 3.0. When problems are found under 3.0, it should be
possible to change the input to the conversion tool in order to help
it make the correct tranlation.
I really wish I had been able to attend, but I'm glad that your Py3k presentation from earlier this month is on Google Video. I glanced through the slides yesterday and the concept of only Unicode strings made me happy and worried at the same time. While watching the video last night, I found myself aptly described when you mentioned the confusion of when to encode and decode, and how web application developers in the middle of America seem to be hit hardest by this issue. I've been beating my head against the unicode wall for the past year, getting by but just barely. Watching/hearing you explain the differences between the Py3k Bytes and Unicode objects, in combination with some other recent reading, was what finally made everything click.
Today I've been fixing our code. Out of a heavy-handed attempt to silence some of the UnicodeDecodeErrors, I had a few places where I was doing nasty encoding and decoding, almost at random, just to make things work. Now I have that code and more working in a unified way and I'm much happier.
So, thanks for that presentation. Looking ahead to Python 3000 taught me something valuable I could use today that I had a hard time extracting from all of the unicode documents and tutorials out there.
I enjoyed your Py3k talk because it really brought everything together for me. I had been hearing separately about all the changes that were going to appear, and it was at the talk that I pulled together a mental picture of how this was all going to look in Python 3.0. Previously I wasn't so sure about some things, but when I look at it all together everything makes good sense. I'm happy to see where Python is going: these are sensible, necessary, and well thought-out changes.
I don't suppose harmonizing the iterator protocol to match other protocols -- as in, renaming next() to __next__() and adding a built-in next(i) to call i.__next__(), just like iter() or len() -- is still on the table?
Python's role in OLPC is very promising. The idea of having view source for applications and on the fly modification and trial is, in my opinion, best way to get started with computer programming and interest in computers. I am sure, many children will immediately be able to read the python code working inside the application, do some changes and experience the thrill of interacting with computers as masters rather than users.
I'll probably start a hot political debate, but the education/science state of the affairs is indeed catastrophic in the country. And it does not show any signs of getting better either. But can we expect any better if we cut down influx of educated workforce (aka H1-B) while at the same time turning a blind eye at almost a million/yr. uneducated and undocumented folks illegally flocking in and large US corporations enabling them? As for the schools and computers, I'm with you. However, we have to realize that there is a lot of bad stuff kids are exposed to on the net, from porn to very real danger of sexual predators and parents have the right to ask for their kids to be safe. The prime example is the ACLU guy who advocated no filters in library and got arrested for child porn ( http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2900174&page=1 ). As for the modifying the source, when I first heard of that, quite frankly I was quite doubtful of how much use that feature will be. Maybe after a few years of handing OLTPs out, but at this time - I doubt it.
> I'll probably start a hot political debate, but the > education/science state of the affairs is indeed > catastrophic in the country. And it does not show any > signs of getting better either. But can we expect any > better if we cut down influx of educated workforce (aka > H1-B)
how exactly would the american educational system be improved by an increase in the number of foreign college graduates allowed to work in the US, unless they intend to take jobs as teachers in the public school system (which I didnt think was typical of those on H1B visas) ?
> > I'll probably start a hot political debate, but the > > education/science state of the affairs is indeed > > catastrophic in the country. And it does not show any > > signs of getting better either. But can we expect any > > better if we cut down influx of educated workforce (aka > > H1-B) > > how exactly would the american educational system be > improved by an increase in the number of foreign college > graduates allowed to work in the US, unless they intend to > take jobs as teachers in the public school system (which I > didnt think was typical of those on H1B visas) ?
I believe he's saying reduce them--i.e., there's some movement afoot in Washington to reduce H1-B immigration. Which I'm not familiar with, but given the new dominance of the Democrats in DC, that wouldn't be a surprise.
Don't get me wrong, I usually vote Democratic. I'd say it's at least a four-dimensional issue. They're not unrelated, but pressuring the school system by reducing the immigration of highly educated people sounds like a weak strategy... the feedback mechanisms between the two systems are insufficient to improve the situation, and would probably cause other larger effects.
And leaving immigration the same while allowing the schools to deteriorate is also probably a losing proposition too--emigrating to a country where the schools are falling apart doesn't sound too attractive to me.
I did not say H1B program has anything to do with public education directly. I said "education/science", the point being: it is not only public school education that is deteriorating, it's much broader than that and it has a lot to do with immigration policy (or lack thereof). I think that the immigration issues I have mentioned are affecting the country immensely because the average education of the population is no doubt decreasing. The role of parents in the public school system makes them a significant force in shaping it. So, if parents have lower level of education (or no education at all), it shall reflect on the schools as well. I think US should strongly encourage immigration of educated, capable people, set up a guest-worker program to bring in enough unskilled workforce and once for all put a stop on illegal immigration. This does not belong in Python thread by any stretch of imagination, sorry for hijacking the thread.
> This does not belong in Python thread by any stretch of > imagination, sorry for hijacking the thread.
Apologies accepted. There may be strong feelings about this, but please, folks, don't post here! If you feel compelled to write about it, do so in your own blog!
Guido, I think it would be great if you can help our schools but I'm a little jealous. Please note that the kids that can physically go to school are the lucky ones. The US healthcare industry could use scalable IT solutions that improve service while reducing costs. If you know any googlers who are interested in investing their 20% time by applying their skills and especially their courage to healthcare IT problems please send them my way http://www.medicinebrain.com. I think google's special ability to manage scale can contribute to effective healthcare. BTW, I'm local so I can meet them at Pete's. I'll even pay for their chocolate cherry banana bread (if there is any left).
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