Guido van Rossum's Keynote
- Python 2.5 coming Real Soon (Sept 12)
- Python 3000 is a brand-new revision of the language
- Name chosen as a dig at Windows 2000, and so that it couldn't possibly be late
- Fix design bugs dating from 1990-91 + get rid of deprecated features
- First time Guido has allowed himself to be backward incompatible
- Need process, but don't want to become C++ or the next Perl 6
- Alpha early 2007, final a year later (early 2008)
- Cares a lot about bringing users with him
- Will go as far as 2.9 (run out of digits)
- Changes:
- New keywords allowed
- dict.keys(), range(), zip() won't return lists
- All strings Unicode; mutable 'bytes' data type
- Binary file I/O redesign
- Drop as an alias for !=
- Etc.
- See PEP 3099 for things that won't happen (e.g., programmable syntax)
- Can't do perfect mechanical translation (dynamic languages)
- Use pychecker-like tool to handle 80% of cases
- Create instrumented Python 2.x that warns about "doomed" constructs
- See PEP 3100 for the laundry list
- Small points
- Kill classic classes
- Exceptions must derive from BaseException
- int/int will return a float
- Remove last differences between int and long
- Absolute import by default
- Kill sys.exc_type and friends
- Kill dict.has_key, file.xreadlines()
- Kill apply(), input(), buffer(), coerce()
- Kill ancient library modules; more stdlib cleanup
- exec becomes a funciton again
- Kill `x` in favor of repr(x)
- Change except clause syntax to exception E1, E2, E3 as err
- Means "as" becomes a keyword
- [f(x) for x in S] becoms sugar for list(f(x) for x in S)
- General trend in Python away from lists toward more abstract structures
- Kill raise E, arg in favor of raise E(arg)
- zip becomes izip
- lambda lives!
- String types reform (bytes and str instead of str and unicode)
- All data s either ibnary or text (conversions happen at I/O time)
- Different APIs for binary and text streams
- New standard I/O stack
- C stdio has too many problems
- Borrow from Java streams API (bleah)
- Print becomes a function (boo)
- See mailing list thread for justification
- But I think that putting the output file at the end in print(x, y, file=z) is going to trip people up
- Dict views instead of lists
- dict.keys() and dict.items() return a set view
- dict.views() will return a bag (multiset) view
- Can delete from (but not add to) a view
- Modifies the dict accordingly
- Drop default implementations of comparison operators
- <, <=, etc., currently compare by address — will raise TypeError
- == and != should remain (useful)
- Generic and overloaded functions (see his blog — running out of time)
- Python sprints coming up (Aug 21-24)
- Q&A
- Py3K team is smaller than Perl6 — GvR optimistic that people will get the work done
- Taking advantage of multicore?
- GvR not a big fan of threads
- Prefers loose coupling (one process per core)
- Last attempt to get rid of the GIL slowed Python down by 2X
- But neither Jython nor IronPython have a GIL
- Will C-Python API change much?
- Yup — just like the language
- PyPy/type inference?
- Python 4.0 or a sibling language
Travis Oliphant on the State of NumPy
- Chair thanked him for everything he's done to fix numerical Python — standing ovation (well deserved)
- NumPy 1.0 rc1 will be out in a few weeks
- Walked through design — tradeoffs between flexibility, portability, and performance very well thought through
- One part I enjoyed was the way he flipped back and forth between PowerPoint and the interpreter
- Clear that for him, Python is a tool for thinking with
- Showed off weave, an Enthought tool for embedding C in Python for array programming
- Also shows off Pyrex (another tool for the same purpose)
Fernando Perez: Python for Modern Scientific Algorithm Development
- "Why is Python more than 'free MATLAB'?"
- Power of built-in datatypes, higher-level programming, etc.
Michael Aivazis: "Building a Distributed Component Framework"
- Described a medium-sized framework called pyre
- 1200 classes, 75K lines of Python, 30K lines of C++
- Has been running in various incarnations for almost ten years
- Good discussion of architectural issues — perfect example of the kind of researcher I'd like Software Carpentry to produce
Originally posted 2006-08-17 by Greg Wilson in Community.
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