The previous post was getting too long, so I decided to put my impressions on the technical talks here. You may also want to read what our chairman Andy Robinson has to say: http://www.reportlab.org/~andy/accu2005/accu2005.html There you can find the materials of the conference (slides etc.)
ACCU Conference (PyUK) 2005: a personal view (part 2) ======================================================= I am definitely a technical person (as opposed to a marketing person) so what impressed me the most were the presentations by Armin Rigo. He gave two presentations: the official one, about the PyPy project, and a lightening talk about greenlets. Of course, I had heard something about these topics previously, but it is pretty different to see a live demonstration. Armin shown us really *impressive* stuff. Basically, PyPy is already there and it is working! He explained us the idea behind just-in-time compilation (which is actually quite simple), type inference at work, as well as other really impressive stuff, such as sharing an object through an Internet connection (!) The only problem with PyPy as it is now, is that it runs on top of traditional Python and it is terribly slow. Nevertheless, Armin says that it can be made fast and actually faster than current Python. If any other guy would have made the same claim I would have been skeptical, but Armin is the person who gave us Psyco, so I am forced to take him seriously. And the other persons working full time on the project have names such as Christian Tismer, Samuele Pedroni, Holger Krekel, etc. As reported by Jacob Hallen, Guido himself has great hopes for the project and Tim Peters would have liked to work full time on PyPy. The European Community founded the project for 1,300,000+ Euros in two years. So there is money to join the project and to cover travel expenses, if you are an Europen citizen. If you are no EU member, things are more complicated from the burocratical point of view. If somebody knows how to turn around the restrictions and to get some money for non-EU nationalities, I am sure Jacob Hallen would be happy to know. Jacob Hallen is in charge of the organization of the sprints and of some of the burocratical part. He looks like he is doing a pretty good job. Of course his firm, the Strakt, has a very strong and direct interest in the project. It is worth repeating that Alex Martelli worked for Strakt, that Laura Chreighton is there as well, and that recently they hired Samuele Pedroni of Jython fame. So, it looks like they are really doing a LOT for Python in Europe. On my part, I have resolved to keep a close eye on the development in http://codespeak.net, since there is really cool stuff in there, and really innovative ideas. It is unfortunate that most of the stuff is still under SVN and not easy available to the average Joe User, even if there are plenty of things that would be useful to the average Joe User, such as py.test (I would not talk about py.test since it has been discussed elsewhere pretty well, but I definitely like it a lot). I certainly hope that part of this very substantial effort will go back into the standard library someday. It is interesting to notice that Armin and I were the two speakers to use non-traditional presentation materials. Whereas I have just shown simple HTML slides generated by a hand-cooked Python script, he made a very effective usage of Pygame, so you got the impression type inference was as easy as playing PacMan. His presentation is available for download, at the reportlab link I mentioned before, so everybody can see it. Armin also used GraphViz to plot the output of PyPy type-inferencer (I am not sure of the right term to use here, just as I am not sure of what "interpreter" and "compiler" means anymore) and he got really nice-looking results. I am a known evangelist of the "dot" language, http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/05/06/graphviz_dot.html, so I very much liked the approach. It is also fun to notice that both Armin's and my talk were the two metacircular talks of the conference: Armin was talking about implementing a programming language using itself as implementation language (let me remind that PyPy stands for Python in Python) whereas I presented a web application to demonstrate doctest which was used to doctest itself. Well, that's all for the moment. I have written enough for today, now it is time to start playing with greenlets. They are extremely cool, I don't know where I want to use them yet, but I am pretty sure I'll figure out something eventually ;) Michele Simionato -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
