OSCon day 1 : Tutorials

• Effective Python Programming - Anthony Baxter
  • Most intersting stuff I learnt Trust Python, the people who are writting it are awesome!
  • Take away This was a pretty good and easy to follow presentation. Focused on practical aspects of Python, geared toward devs with previous experience of OOP and wanting to move to Python. Anthony is also a very able, fun and engaging presenter.
  • Details
    • Elegance is important, if your code seems heavy and ugly, it's probably wrong.
    • Python does a lot of things for you... if let it do so (don't go crazy on overloading).
    • Duck typing : polymorphism through semantic identity. Way better than complex inheritance hierarchy.


• Design Patterns, Idioms, and Other Python Wonders - Alex and Anna Martelli
  • Most intersting stuff I learnt Never, ever, ever use audio in a presentation...
  • Take away The Martelli's (husband and wife) might be star Python gurus but, as stand up comedians, they suck. Their jokes and puns constantly fell embarassingly flat. Please, don't let me go through that again: cut the "jokes" and the talk will stand great all by itself... Anyway, the material was extremelly advanced Python programming and, though it definitely picked my curiosity and made me want to learn more, it was most of the time flying much higher than my current pedestrian Python skills... I need to read it in the cookbook and study this seriously.
  • Details
    • Starting with extremely basic OOP stuff (delegation vs inheritance)
    • Monostate vs. Singleton : interesting! Check out Robert Martin's article on the subject.
    • Iterators and Generators (pje would have loved that one...)
    • Decorators (started to get over my head here...)
    • Metaclasses (Aaaaaagh...)