PyCon2006
A few remarks about the Python convention this year
Posted by 03/29/2006
Addison, 2006
If you were there perhaps you remember the strange bearded figure that lurked in the back and did not say anything to anybody. That would be me.
This was the first convention of this sort I've gone to. Even though I've programmed for years, I've always thought of myself as outside of any community. But I'm trying to improve.
The Django demonstrations came across better than the Turbogears demonstrations. Funnier, more impressive - and with the all important reality check i.e. Django has an actual history of actual working application. I think Turbogears would be served well with that.
The Plone demonstration was very good, for the same reason. People use Plone - and it works. I forget about Plone because it is no fun for me personally - but it seems to work well for a lot of people. I think it does address the useability problem better than most frameworks. I think this is something Django __could__ have going for it.
Also someone from Enfold Systems talked about using Plone or some kind of subset of it to manage changesets and publish material to various architectures like Asp and Jsp. This resonates with me because I work for the state, and getting new technology (such as Plone) deployed on a server is next to impossible.
Although I don't remember the details (that's just cause I'm stupid) I was struck by 2 things:
- Plone, and the people that are heavy into designing it are dealing with the real world at the moment - which is good for Python
- They are doing good work and shouldn't be forgotten about.
The Zope talks were wearied, belaboured and apologetic. Sort of "We know this sucks - but we can't seem to do anything about it" - which is at least better than an IBM talk about Service Oriented Architecture and BPEL - nothing apologetic about those talks.
The talk about developing a new parser for Python 2.5 was actually fascinating to me. Whoever it was that gave the talk (I really should have noted these things) seemed extremely competent - and wasn't there to entertain anybody - so I think he went into the proper amount of detail.
Ian Bicking gave a couple of talks. The first was about using eggs as plugins, and I think a lot of people were more wondering "What is an egg exactly?" He also talked about his battle with the server administrator within. Although I enjoyed the talk - I didn't come away with a clear plan of action. I think Python needs to learn some lessons from C# and Java and Ruby in this realm. And quickly.
In the whole religous war of Python vs. Ruby - I'll have to wait until I go to the RailsConf this year. Rails is rolling, picking up steam etc...(I think there are a lot of puns available there) but Python actually seems to have more experience with more things. I guess that could be a blessing or a curse.
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