We had another great turn out for this month’s Melbourne Python Users Group meeting at Inspire 9.
Richard Jones, Javier Candeira and I spoke about our highlights of PyCon AU 2013.
Ed Schofield spoke on “The future”, with Python 2 to 3 migration. My hastily scribbled notes included:
- Most people in the audience are still using Python 2, with a few people using Python 3 (as well as Python 2)
- PEP 404: There will not be a Python 2.8
- Alex Gaynor: “Python 2 is the next Cobol”
- Python 3 wall of superpowers
- This used to be the wall of shame
- boto is not yet ported?
- Lots to like in Python 3
- New syntax, eg function annotations
- Changed semantics for some functions, eg. input(), int(), zip(), super(), str(), round(), …
- Byte string semantics with Unicode; Py3: explicit conversions
- from __future__ import *
- for backporting
- print, proper division, Unicode literals, absolute imports
- Ed’s “future” module
- https://github.com/edschofield/python-future
- v0.3.3
- from future import *
- write Py3 code that can be imported into Py2?
- “Migrating strategy” notes by Alexandre Vassalotti, 6 points for one-way migration: Py2 -> Py3
- Improve your test strategy, port to Py 2.6, enable Py3 warnings, …
- “python-futurize” script, uses 2to3 script
- runs with Py2 and Py3
- converts to Py3 code with Py3 idioms
- need to manually fix Unicode
- demo with the “iso8601” package from PyPI
- PEP 414 – “Developer energy should be reserved…” quote
- Good porting guide: http://docs.python.org/2/howto/pyporting.html
- There are lots of key scientific libraries now support Py3
- PyPy now supports Py3
Javier spoke about his work investigating different Python libraries for interfacing with Github. He is currently using githubpy, which has a (relatively) small number of lines of code, no non-stdlib imports, and it’s apparently well worth reading to see how it’s done.
Other notes:
- We had an interesting mix of Python users and from a show of hands, not many people are doing web development
- We should be using pillow for image processing instead of PIL
- Pyweek is coming up! If you want to get involved, look at Richard’s pygame tutorials
- Python 3.4a1 is out
- PEP 8 has been updated
The next meeting is September 2, 6pm, at Inspire 9.