Notes from MPUG, June 2012

These are my notes from the Melbourne Python Users Group meeting this month at Inspire 9. Any errors are 99% likely to be mine in the transcribing or the understanding, rather than the speaker’s.

Tennessee Leeuwenburg – Udacity and Coursera: online courses

• Online tertiary-level courses, spun out of places like Stanford,  subjects cover computer science, science, statistics, etc
• Udacity
  • Courses are 7 weeks long, ~ 10 courses on offer, less than Coursera
  • Perhaps “friendlier” than Coursera, more “cool”?
  • Tennessee has done the AI course; loved it
• Coursera
  • Stanford, UPenn, Princeton, etc
  • Getting 100% “is the new pass”
  • Has a wider range of non-CS courses
• Courses start on designated dates, rather than on-demand
• 60 – 90 minutes of video per week? and 1 – 5 hours of work per week

Ed Schofield – What’s new in Python 3.3

• A straw poll of the room showed that, out of well over 20 people, no-one has done serious work with Python 3!
• Python 3.3 is in alpha at moment, aiming for a 25 Aug 2012 release date
• Some key changes:
  • Unicode: u'Hello' is back: PEP 414, helps with porting from Python 2
  • Space efficient Unicode: PEP 393
  • New packaging module: deprecates distutils, replaces pip, distutil2, etc
  • venv module: virtualenv-like support
  • lzma – new, compression algorithm
  • decimal module: faster, rewritten in C
  • bz2: rewritten, more flexible
  • mock: Mock objects for testing; now in the standard library
  • os module: lots of POSIX fixes
  • OSError: PEP 3151
  • Finer granularity in exceptions, with lots of subclassed exceptions
• Read the “what’s new in 3.3” release notes
• Significant libraries and their Python 3 compatibility status:
  • Django 1.5 is due in spring 2012 with experimental Python 3.3 support
  • Numpy supports Python 3 (has since v.1.5.0, Aug 2010)
  • matplotlib-py3k branch on GitHub, ported late 2011
• Plenty of hold-outs: boto, Fabric, South, gunicorn, Werkzeug, oauthlib, Flask & Jinja…
• The Who’s on Python 3? website tracks the top 50 Python projects and their Python 3 compatibility
• “6” – compatibility library for Python 2 and Python 3

Rhyd Olwin – Python in a hostile environment

• 550 users, but outside of IT, there are only 4 developers & no dev culture or environment
• How do you develop in a Windows shop with locked down PCs and no admin privileges?
• No exe’s can be downloaded/installed, but can use setup.py to download source code and build

Richard Jones – LightTable

• Different paradigm for IDE/coding
• On Kickstarter, has funded Python support as well as Clojure and SQL
• Have a look halfway through the promo video at the Flask demo

The next meeting is July 2 at 6pm.