PyConUK - A great success

Well, thanks to the hard work of a number of people, PyConUK was a great success. Personally I didn't notice anything go wrong (the wireless LAN "just worked"; organisation was good; more people turned up than expected... everyone seemed happy etc etc!).

Highlights for me are probably :

  • Stuart Langridge's Jackfield talk - I now know what it's about...
  • Functional programming-isms via the Functional Programming introduction, and the Great Language debate.
  • Hearing more about Groovy, which seems like a really nice idea (it compiles into Java bytecode, but seems to have a very python-like syntax...) - more investigation is required here :)
  • Catching up with various ex-colleagues and ex-bosses :)
  • Learning about Pylons, Twisted and Django, and now having a greater awareness of them
  • Seeing how other-people-do-stuff, which always leads to further inspiration and interesting thoughts and repercussions for your own code...
  • Finally understanding what PyPy is all about

I'm sure there will be another PyConUK next year, and I'm sure I'll be there.

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Comments

great success indeed

It all went so well, it's almost a shame we have to wait for a year for the next one!

Glad you liked the Jackfield

Glad you liked the Jackfield talk. I personally still don't understand what the point of PyPy is, because I missed that talk...

pypy - in english

(This is from my memory, I have lots of notes on it from the talk, but they're at home; I'm not).

PyPy is a build platform for /usr/bin/python, that's split into three sections ...

Firstly, you define the language (Python) in a static checked language (rPython).
Next you decide which modules you want (E.g. funky garbage collector, stackless python, restricted python, jit etc) and then finally you decide the platform - e.g. Unix, .NET, Java, Windows and so on.

PyPy then goes away and compiles it for you.

The intention is to remove the duplication between port code bases - and to make it easier to e.g. change the garbage collector, or to have a JIT version of Python.

It looks quite cool, and some of the demos given were really good (e.g. the restricted python, or python that cannot use more than $memory_limit or can't use more than $cpu_time.)
I think PyPy currently only supports Python 2.4.3, and isn't yet as quick as CPython.

Assuming $another_language can be defined in rPython, there is probably no reason why PyPy cannot be used to produce a binary for $another_language - I think he mentioned that this had been done for Ruby? (fuzzy memory!?!).

Hey, great summary. I just

Hey, great summary. I just wanted to add that the languages PyPy implements beside Python are Prolog (strangely enough :-) ), Scheme and JavaScript. Those implementations are all not quite finished (especially the JavaScript one), though.

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