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Python Conference Coming Soon 45

Posted by michael from the strangling-the-competition dept.
nnorwitz writes "PyCon 2004 is coming to Washington, DC at the end of March. It's a great place to meet lots of smart people and learn new things. Many interesting discussions go far beyond Python into other programming languages and topics. We should find out more about the Pie-thon, the OSAF since Mitch Kapor is the keynote speaker. There may even be a few surprises. The price is only $175, but early bird registration ends soon. It's not too late to submit a presentation either. I hope to see lots of new faces this year! I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers. :-)"
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Python Conference Coming Soon More

Python Conference Coming Soon

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  • uhm, I'm not going from Ruby to Python (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09, 2004 @07:01PM (#7933956)
    Sorry, Python is a lot better than Perl but then again so's VB, eh?

    The Python community is turning into a bizarre mirror-image of the Perl community: full of themselves and a little too eager to show off the latest "trick" you can do in Python.

    I read Python books/sites and they say with a straight face "the great thing about Python is there's only one way to do things" .. what they fail to mention is, one way *per Python version*.

    I first used Python at 1.5 when it was pushed as a "prototyping language". I'm not coming back until they finish figuring out their object model and scoping rules.

    Someday, a bright Pythoner will get hit by lightning and realize, "hey, str(obj) just calls obj.__repr__() .. why the heck don't we all just call obj.__repr__() directly? And do we really need *four* underscores? And do we really need to type 'self' all the time???" At that moment, the Rubification will begin.

    Sincerely,
    Ruby Zealot

    • Re:uhm, I'm not going from Ruby to Python (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unlikely. Why use Ruby or Python when Common Lisp is better than either. Like most scripting languages, python is slowly reinventing lisp, badly. This is no accident. Like Gosling and Java, van Rossum drip-feeds lisp concepts to his willing sheep rather than truly innovating.

    • I read Python books/sites and they say with a straight face "the great thing about Python is there's only one way to do things" .. what they fail to mention is, one way *per Python version*. I first used Python at 1.5 when it was pushed as a "prototyping language". I'm not coming back until they finish figuring out their object model and scoping rules.

      So you're saying Python evolves. Doesn't C, C++, Java, and ... Ruby do the same? It is easy to have many Python versions installed and usable at the sam

      • Now about 'self'.

        Thats not correct. The parent poster is reffering to the fact that methods in Python have a argument called self, which you sometimes have to type, sometimes to declare, sometimes not.

        In SmallTalk self is a reference, like in Python, to the object the current running method belongs to, but you have never to type it except you need it.

        For the C++/Java folks, self is the equivalent of this. No one likes code like that: self.doThis(); self.doThat();

        Python is in some parts really brain d
        • I do not find that static method have any real uses in python. In C++, their main use is to be able to write a non friend function that has access to member of the class. I guess it also allows nicer grouping. In python, every function has access to member of the class because there are no access modifiers for members. Also, losts of classes are inside a module that has a name very close or similar to the class used. So, a function defined in the module is the same as a static method. self is a small bur

        • Thats not correct. The parent poster is reffering to the fact that methods in Python have a argument called self, which you sometimes have to type, sometimes to declare, sometimes not.
          I'm well aware of that. But 'self' is not a keyword. If you don't like to type it, use something shorter, say: 's'.
          I have no clue what you mean by "declaring" and "sometimes not". It is always there, it can be called differently. And you never declare things in Python.

          For the C++/Java folks, self is the equivalent o

    • I've been a long-time Perl programmer, though I've not used a boatload of packages nor much of the horrid OO.

      A couple of years ago, I decided to look into Python and Ruby. Python looked OK, but not that different. I did like the indent-as-group idea, which was different. Ruby looked very cool. But it was impossible to get good documentation. It seemed like a Japanese cult with a few western initiates.

      Well, MacOS X ships with Perl, Python, and Ruby (and PHP, and ...) so I figured I'd try them again.

      I s

  • Why would I want to convert from Ruby to Python? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Colonel Panic ( 15235 ) on Friday January 09, 2004 @11:13PM (#7935411)
    Sure there are a lot of similarities, but I prefer Ruby's purer OO model and I don't prefer Python's whitespace as syntax requirements and the need to type self everywhere (not to mention all those underscores). And where's the fun in there's only one way to write it?

    Python definately has some advantages over Perl, but as a Rubyist, it doesn't offer me any advantages that would convince me to switch.

    'Different strokes for different folks' as they say down at the retirement center

    • Re:Why would I want to convert from Ruby to Python (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GCP ( 122438 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @08:06AM (#7936982)
      I like a *lot* of what I see in Ruby, and I strongly agree with your criticisms of Python (though I'm still undecided about the whitepace issue.)

      Even so, I think Matz's attitude about Unicode and internationalization rules Ruby out as a serious candidate for me.

      All Windows and Macs machines being sold today already use Unicode. The Unix world is in last place but the conversion is happening almost everywhere. The very last holdout against Unicode will probably be the Unix-style OSes in Japan. While all other platforms are Unicode and most of the Unix world is converted, they will be the last of the legacy holdouts.

      Japanese *nix is also the center of Matz's focus, and it shows. He has made it clear that the principal driving force behind Ruby's design is to help him do his own Japanese work in an encoding (EUC-JP) that he says is "good enough for me [him]". Since EUC-JP doesn't support anything well except for Japanese, he clearly doesn't internationalize his own work, and his comments make it pretty clear that anyone who does want to follow modern internationalization practices had better look elsewhere for a language.

      Also, the libraries in Ruby are far less developed than in Python, and I don't see them getting "good enough" anytime soon. Matz's Japanese Unix-centric community just hasn't produced the libraries that the rest of us are beginning to demand from our production languages.

      If I were just tinkering around with personal utilities and if legacy subset charsets were good enough for my text needs, then it might be all right. But I need lots of big, solid, production quality libraries for Unicode-based commercial systems, and Ruby isn't close. (Even Python is a stretch.)

      • Ruby2 will have Unicode support. Read this [rubyist.net].
        • If I could give you a mod point for the interesting pointer I would.

          One slide indicating that Unicode encodings may, at some vague point in the future, be treated on a par with the obsolete national legacy encodings Matz prefers is hardly a bold step toward internationalization. It's more of Matz's "well, if you want to use Unicode, I won't stop you" level of commitment to internationalization.

          • I think you misinterpreted the slide talking about Ruby 1.9.x. The odd numbered Ruby versions are the development track, while the even numbered versions are release caliber. Ruby2 will have Unicode support and Ruby1.9.x is where it will show up first. The lack of multilignual support is actually listed as a reason as to why Ruby currently stucks. This isn't half-assed support of Unicode.
      • I think it's more than unicode...

        A while back I (a long-time perl guy) decided to look into ruby and python. I liked some of python's rethinking of certain ideas, but I liked ruby's total-OO and was really taken with it. BUT it was nearly impossible to find any English resources. It was definitely still a Japanese cult with some US initiates. So I stuck with perl.

        Maybe there are an abundance of resources for ruby now. (By "resources" I mean code examples, web sites, bundled packages, etc.) I'm not sure, b
    • Why do you take the posting of a Python Conference as an attempt to get you to switch? Some of us happen to feel quite secure in our choices and don't take the success of other languages as a threat or conversion attempt. You should try it sometime, where "it" is being confident and secure in your own choices.
      • Why do you take the posting of a Python Conference as an attempt to get you to switch?

        Well, as you might recall, the original post of the story contained the following at the end:

        I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers.

        So I was just obiging ;-)

        I suppose that sentence was a bit ambiguous as it could mean that he/she wants to talk to people who had converted* to Perl or Ruby from Python (or any other language), but I read it as he/she wanted to talk to people who had conve
    • I don't prefer Python's whitespace as syntax requirements

      I don't mean to offend you, but just curious: How do you feel when you use here documents, which include whitespace as syntax requirements?

  • D. Frickin' C. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chromodromic ( 668389 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @03:24AM (#7936339)
    It's a great place to meet lots of smart people ...

    Gosh, this isn't biased. Well, I'm sure it is, in fact, one place to meet smart people, but I wish whomever was organizing this thing wasn't basing it in D.C., which is also a great place to get shot, spend money on mediocre food, either freeze to death or fry in ridiculous humidity, and generally hang out with interns working for lawyers, students wanting to become lawyers, or lawyers.

    Yeah, granted, the PyCon people will probably not be lawyers, but it is D.C. so you never know. And who decided D.C. was a likely meeting place for programmers? George Washington University? Yawn.

    At least Perl people go on cruises. Nah. Sign me up for the PyCon when they hold it in Vegas, like normal technology conventioneers, and we do Twisted seminars by day and other twisted things by night.

    • And who decided D.C. was a likely meeting place for programmers?

      All of the Python core team (including Guido until recently) live in DC. Granted, it's better if the conference was held in Vegas, on a cruise ship or in Monaco parhaps, but you're forgetting that the organizers of it are volunteers and do not get paid. The days when you could get a sponsor to shell out a few hundred grand to fly everyone to Vegas are gone.

      DC is home to places like NASA [nasa.gov], NIST [nist.gov], NIH [nih.gov]... Quite a few well known open source folk

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