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by Ted Leung.
Original Post: PyCon, Day 2
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It's a measure of PyCon quality that I am so busy that I barely have time to write a blog entry. I've met so many people and had so many interesting discussions. I suspect you'll be seeing a stream of related posts as I recover.
In any case, the highlights of Day 2 were: Guido's keynote, the Pyrex talks, and the doctest talk, as well as conversations with Mitch Kapor, Anthony Baxter, and Jeremy Hylton. A few words on each. Guido covered some of the upcoming items in 2.4 -- I got more out of the way that he interacted with the Python community (even though it was a keynote), and his taste in language design than I did out of the actual features (which you can read about in the notes - a reminder that the crazy Mac SubEthaEdit people are churning out notes on many of the talks. It's passed out of my hands -- I'm only hosting some of the documents on the Powerbook, others have taken over some hosting. About all I'm doing is providing some server space. See the contributor's lists to see who you should really be thanking).
I finally understand what Pyrex is and how it helps with Python performance and wrapping C code. I think that its an approach that can be fruitful for a sizable number of problems. Ditto for doctest. Actually, I'm sort of kicking myself over this one, since doctest was in the standard library and would have been preferable for most of the unit tests that I wrote when I started at OSAF. Fixing this would be a nice way for someone to get involved.
Each of my discussions with Mitch, Anthony, and Jeremy could fill one or more blog posts, so I have to put them off for now. As a final "flavor of the Con" kind of thing: Between lunch and the afternoon talks, Steve Holden held a tongue twister contest -- contestants had to read Steve's tongue twister in 10 seconds or less. Someone at Bob Ippolito's table (it may have been Bob for all I know) typed the tongue twister into a Mac and used the "speak text" service on it.
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