ACCU Conference (PyUK) 2005

[Michele Simionato]

This should go in a blog, but I do not have one, nor any intention to
start one, so I thought I will post here instead.

Warning: this is a long post!

ACCU Conference (PyUK) 2005: a personal view
=======================================================

Maybe not everybody knows that last week (19-23 of April) we had a
pretty important event in Oxford: the fifth PyUK conference  - hosted
by the ACCU association - which is probably the second most important
Python-related event in Europe after EuroPython.

ACCU means Association of C and C++ Users, so most of the people there
were not Python programmers; still it amazed me how much steam Python
has gathered in the last years between C++ programmers.

Ideally, I was there to give just a short presentation on doctest,
but since Alex Martelli got hired from Google, I had to act as
replacement of the Martelli & Ravenscroft couple, since it not
that easy to find somebody crazy enough to take over or a 6-hours
guru-level Python course. And, of course, there was some Italian
mafia involved ;)

It is not easy to act as a replacement for the martellibot,
especially on short notice, but I tried to do my best. BTW,
interested people can find my notes somehere on the ACCU website
https://www.accu.org/conference/ or on my site
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/python/oxford-lectures.zip

I was actually worried a bit about people deserting the lectures once
they discovered that Alex & Anna where not coming; it turns out my
worries were injustified. We actually had something like 20 persons
there, so we filled the room pretty well.

The interesting thing was that at least half the people were
experienced C++ programmers willing to learn Python, and not actual
Python programmers. So, I had to correct the scope of the lectures
in real time and I could not cover metaclasses, whereas I covered
decorators but not as well as they deserve. Next year the tutorial will

probably have a title such as "Python for C++ programmers" and the
program
will be changed accordingly. Anyway, people were extremely interested
and the session (originally scheduled to end at 4 PM) actually
went go until after 6 PM!

It turned out that one of my "students" was Stephen Turner from
Microsoft:
Steve's title is "Developer evangelist" and it is part of his job to
present to the developers the new cool projects Microsoft is working
on:
in this particular case, he went to the course since he in charge
of evangelizing Jim Hugunin's brainchild, IronPython, i.e. Python
running (fast!) on Dot Net, and he wanted to have a good picture
of CPython capabilities.

Obviously when I discovered that, I immediately asked him if he was
willing to give a presentation on IronPython. We were lucky, since he
accepted, he got some slides from Jim Hugunin's PyCON presentation
and he gaves us a truly wonderful demonstration of IronPython
capabilities. *Really* impressive.

One cannot overrate the importance of this development for the future
of Python. I asked Steve if Microsoft plans to support IronPython as
part of the DotNet choice of languages: the answer was that there is no
intention to sell IronPython. IronPython is an OpenSource project based
on DotNet but it is not part of the DotNet offer and there are no
plans in this sense.

Some of you may be surprised (I certainly was) but Microsoft has been
financing various Open Source projects in the last few years, released
under BSD-style licences. IronPython is just one of these projects.
There will probably be more. So stay tuned and keep an eye on what
Redmont
is doing. What it clear is that now Microsoft knows about the existence
of
Python and it is actually investing money on it.

This is quite a change, especially with respect to what our keynote
speaker, Greg Stein, told us about his experience with Microsoft
7-8 years ago, when he was employed by them: at that time Microsoft's
reaction to Python was something along the line of "Python what? is
that a programming language?".

Greg also told has about the programming language policy at Google
(his current) employer: Googles uses and acknowledges officially only
three mainstream languages: C++, Java, and Python. Python *is*
mainstream
for them. And judging from the space accorded to Python at the ACCU
conference,
Python is mainstream for the ACCU members too.

An extremely impressive accomplishement for Python, if you think about
it. And if Microsoft and Google are not enough, know that Nokia
is offering Python on their mobile phones. Tapio Tallgren gaves us an
extremely interesting technical talk on how you can program the
Series 90 mobile using Python. They are targetting Python 2.2
and most of the standard library just works, the speed is pretty
good and actually they were surprised of how easy was to make the
port.

All in all, pretty good news, people! It seems a pretty good moment
to be a Python programmer!

I have something else to say, but I will make another post for that.

        Michele Simionato