We’re heading towards the end of the afternoon from a great weekend’s worth of PyCon, Right now Ted Leung is giving the key-note on Dynamic Languages. JavaScript’s acceptance and speed improvements is being high-lighted, Ted seems to have some worries about JavaScript’s continual growth.
Yesterday we had Mark Shuttleworth‘s key-note on how he wanted to see Python give better support to Transactional Memory and Cloud Computing.Both talks interesting and inspiring. It felt like Mark really buys into the Python community with lots of ‘our language’ references, he’s a great speaker to boot. He dug at our GIL and said ‘please solve scaling above 1 core!’.
Raymond Hettinger gave some great talks including a look at Python 2.6 and 3.0, behind-the-scenes Python containers (cool src link) and A.I. with Python. Did you know that a list’s growth pattern is 0, 4, 8, 16, 25, 35, 46, 58, 72, 88, … elements and for large lists you never waste more than 12.5% of memory? Neato.
It looks like PyPy is coming up to a 1.0 release later this year. James Gardner gave a good Birds of a Feather session on Pylons, this is relevant to me due to TurboGear’s use of Pylons – ShowMeDo is written in TurboGears.
Zeth tells me that last year there were about 150 attendees, I think we have over 200 this year, next year EuroPython meets PyConUK so we’ll have closer to 500. I also met a bunch of regional Python usergroups including Python Ireland – there’s obvious growth in our userbase with a lot of smart people coding away.
At the end of last night’s dinner we had a talk on the Lunar Society, it was long (2 hours!) but told a great story. The drinking, inevitably, went on late <ouch>.
I look forward to next year’s PyCon UK! Pictures etc via the PyCon wiki which links to flickr.
As a side note it was great to talk to Pythonistas and hear that our ShowMeDo is fairly well known (given that we’ve never had a marketing budget, or time, or resources…) and well-respected. I think I’ve recruited a few more authors along the way.
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