PyCon Day 1

Today is the first day of the conference proper. The most popular talk (measured by the online talk planner widget) was canceled. Titlted "Designing Applications with Non-Relational Databases" I was sure to go, but alas the speaker canceled for reasons unknown.

This year there is a "Green Room" for speakers and conference volunteers. I wasn't expecting it to be green but I was hoping for a lounge. Instead it is a purely functional ops area - the network is run from here. It has power strips, a test projector, and free coffee. It might not have a wet bar but it is still a nice perk.

Talks

[updated as I go to them]
Brett Cannon "How Python is Developed." It was a good overview of core python development pitched at newbies. He sketched out the basic bug and feature cycles, how to [eventually] get core commit privs, etc. It was mainly an informational session so it included lost of links to the existing documentation (some of which was written by Brett).
Jess Noller "Introduction to Multiprocessing in Python." 'Multiprocessing' is a module that lets you do .. multiprocessing in python. I only new vaguely what it did before. Now I now kinda what it does. I might know more but I was busy refactoring some itertools types [see below].
Raymond Hettinger "Easy AI in Python." A ramble through several different problems with code of the solvers. The point is to show how easy it is to solve most problems. So easy that a kid could literally do it (part of the talk was about why kids should do it). I missed most off this one because I was hacking [see below] but I'd seen it before so I didn't mind.

Balls

I should read python-dev more regularly. It turns out Hettinger went and implemented fast-C permutations, combinations, and cartesian product in the itertools module. You know, just like the probstat module I wrote. That old code is pretty un-pythonic (I wrote it in my inbetween stage so it is a generic lib with both python and perl wrappings). I had a mostly finished rewrite that was CPython from the ground up and - suprise! - it looks almost identical to Raymond's. Almost, I spun out the iterator into a separate object so the base object could have a len (iterators aren't allowed to support len). His doesn't have random access but that is one of the things no one used on mine so I was going to drop it anyway.