[portland] Suggestions wanted for Python Quiz for Python meetup next Tue; Reverse Q&A questions

[Rob Bednark]

Submit your ideas for questions for the Python Quiz for the Portland Python
Meetup next Tue, Apr 10, 2012, 6:30pm, Urban Airship).  Most anything
Python-related is fair game, any level of difficulty.

Email your quiz suggestions to me, rbednark at gmail.com, or use this form:
http://goo.gl/ujoEy  Submit your suggestions before 3pm Tue, Apr 10.

I will also be facilitating Reverse Q&A / Ask The Audience.  This is your
chance to ask questions of the audience (advice, problems, poll the
audience, ...).  If you're not going to be at the meetup and want to ask
something, email me or use the above form (http://goo.gl/ujoEy).  Some
example questions from past meetups:
  What is the clear winner among the Python web frameworks?
 Is anyone using PyPy in production?
 What do like and not like about Python?

Rob


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

================================================================================
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
 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 -
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