[portland] Submit your ideas for Python Quiz or Ask the Audience for tomorrow's Portland Python meetup

[Rob Bednark]

Do you have any ideas for questions for the Python Quiz or Ask the 
Audience at tomorrow's Python meetup?  Email them to me or submit them 
here:
   http://bit.ly/pypdx
Anything Python-related is fair game, any level of difficulty.  Submit 
your suggestions before 3pm Tue, May 8.

Ask the Audience is your chance to ask questions of the audience 
(advice, problems, poll the audience, ...).

Rob Bednark


Here's my notes from the last four Ask the Audience / Reverse Q&A sessions:

===============================================================================
Portland Python Meetup Ask the Audience / Reverse Q&A
Tue, April 10, 2012
About 51 people present

Q: What do you use for editing/debugging/....?
A:
   Vi/vim 27
   Emacs 12
   Sublime 7
   Eclipse / PyDev 5
   Visual Studio 2.5
   Pycharm 2
   Gedit 2
   Textmate 2
   MG 1
   Ed 1

Q: What is your job status?
A:
   Permanent jobs 22
   Freelancing?  6
   Unemployed 6
   Students 4

Q: How many people are using Python 3 in production?
A: 1

Q: For the quiz question with the unicode string, how would you include 
a '\u' in a string that included Unicode Escapes?
A: u'\\uqwe\u0020asd'


Q: How many learned to program by going to school?
A: 7
    On your own?  35

================================================================================
Portland Python Meetup Reverse Q&A
Tue, Mar 13, 2012
Q: For newbie programmers, what is a good, small web development project 
that can be done in Python and Django?
A:
    Blog.
    CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) (address book, todo list).
    Message syndicator (post to Facebook and Twitter).
    Extend the polling tutorial to work as a meeting organization tool 
(submit ideas, ...).
    Learn how forms work.
Q: Could someone talk about Python and NoSQL -- explanation and options?
A:
    - NoSQL is a movement against SQL;
    - lots of Python interfaces for NoSQL db's;
    - Zope object db (zodb);
    - PostgreSQL meeting this week is about NoSQL;
    - tomorrow is CouchConf in Portland.
Q: Could someone talk more about Pyracite?
A: (Graham talked about it, but I didn't capture any notes)
Q: What did you find interesting at PyCon US 2012?
A:
    Link Grammar (natural lang parser); used by Relix (python bindings); 
break English sentences down
    Enamel - Enthought - kit for GUI construction
    Brandon Rhodes - talk on how memory works - virtual memory issues; 
faulting; reference counting;
    Python3 transition?  Guido - going fine, will take long time, 
transition is happening;
    Django 1.4 coming; 1.5 will start rolling in Python3
    Guido - Google+ post - 2.7 is done (no more development)
    Carl Meyer - testing in Django talk; very good

================================================================================
Portland Python Meetup Reverse Q&A
Tue, Jan 10, 2012

Q: What are you using for automated web testing?
  Watir
  GhostJS
  Selenium (wrote own client using SeleniumRC) - 7
  Alfajor / Django_Alfajor - 4
Sahi.co.in <http://Sahi.co.in>
  Cram - http client in Curl; Unixy (non-web browser) - 1
  Twill - 2
  Ruby / Cucumber / Rspec / Capybara - 2
  Lettuce - 2

Q: Does anybody do quant (quantitative) work with Python? (scipy, ...) 
(stats, math optimization, ...)
  gmpy (arbitrary precision)
  pandas - financial, time series
  meetup group - solving academic problems (Numerical Computing group -- 
merged into another)
  Portland R group

Q: What is the clear winner among the Python web frameworks?
  Django
  Pyramid - new and upcoming
  Flask - ate up smaller frameworks
  CherryPy
  WSGI - roll your own
  Werkzeug*
  Twisted - it's own world; server protocol framework; lots persistent 
connections; asynch network framework

Q: Anyone using PyPy in production?
A: No

Q: What do you like about Python?
    - reads like psuedocode
    - __metaclass__
    - free beer at meetup
    - forced organization (whitespace; no brackets)
    - module distribution (eggs, ...); environments (virtualenv, pip, ...)
    - great community
    - one right way to do things
    - python community - maintainers stick around;

Q: What do you not like about Python?
    - too slow
    - GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) - not truly multi-threaded
    - live debugging tools awkward; not powerful
    - lambdas (it's only one expression; not a real anonymous function 
compared to other true functional languages)
    - fragmentation of the web platforms (webpy, django, pylons, zope)
    - BDFL (led Python into the woods) (lamdbas, GIL, Python3, ...)
    - Python3
    - lot of lib maintainers have not chosen to go to Python3 yet
    - no case, "x if something else y"
    - variable scoping is weird
    - subclassing, overriding, super, keyword args -- lot of syntax; 
awkward syntax
    - don't like spaces preference over tabs
    - loop - repeat - extra expressions before you hit the repeat 
section; initial value; increment; loop/until/repeat (Databasic on Pick OS)

================================================================================
Portland Python Meetup Reverse Q&A
Tue, Nov 8, 2011

Q: What are you using for building REST API's?
  Restish - 2
  Piston - 2
  Tastypy - 1
  DjangoRESTframework - 1
  Werkzeug - 4
  roll your own (httplib) - 9
  Twisted - 2
  Diesel -

Q: What version of Python are you using in production?
  2.4 - 1
  2.5 - 1
  2.6 - 9
  2.7.2 - 9
  3.1 - 2

Q: How long before you will be using Python 3 in production?

Q: How many are waiting for Django to move to v3?
4

Q: Who has been paid to program in...
        Ruby? 7
        Perl? 7
        C? 14
        C++ 11
        Java? 12
        Javascript? 19
        PHP - 14
        XBase - 1
        Cobol - 1
        bash - 13
        C# - 7
        J - 1
        Go - 2
        Haskell - 2
        Objective C - 3
        ActionScript -

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/portland/attachments/20120507/67088a8d/attachment.html>