The SoCal Piggies had their third meeting at USC on May 17th at 7:00 PM. A record number of 7 Piggies attended (Daniel, Howard, Mark, Grig, Brian, Titus, Diane), joined by Tristan De Buysscher from Caltech. It was nice to meet Howard, Brian and Mark and to talk about Python while munching on a pretty decent Pizza Hut nourishment.
Titus presented part 2 of his Quixote 2.0 tutorial. He quickly showed the introductory examples, then delved into more advanced stuff, showing how to manage sessions with Quixote. One thing I took away from it is that it takes remarkably little code. Generally speaking, Quixote seems very crisp and clean, and Titus' tutorials are very good in smoothing the learning curve, which can otherwise be steep. You can find his tutorial as a work-in-progress [http://darcs.idyll.org/~t/projects/quixote2-tutorial/ here].
Titus then spent some time talking about his Web app. testing tool called [http://www.idyll.org/~t/www-tools/twill.html twill]. We couldn't get a live demo unfortunately, but it was an interesting discussion nevertheless, covering things such as the cmd module, pyparsing, and especially a great use of metaclasses. Titus ended his presentation talking about his Cucumber module, another magical metaclass-heavy module that provides a mapping between Python code and SQL statements, hiding the complexity of SQL away from the programmer.
Daniel was next, and he gave us an [http://www.highenergymagic.org/presentations/iterators/ overview of iterators, generators and continuations]. He highly recommended the little-used itertools module, which provides functions designed to work with iterators. The functions are similar to standard Python built-ins like map and range, but allow you to write code that runs faster and uses less memory. Daniel then covered generators, which can be seen as a way to express iterators using functions as opposed to classes (if you see a yield statement anywhere in a function, that function is a generator). However, there are many other and sometimes slightly brain-melting uses of generators.
Daniel ended with a mind-boggling discussion of continuations, which (luckily or unluckily?) are not and will not be offered as a feature of Python, due to GvR's dislike of them.
Many thanks to Titus and Daniel for their presentations.
The next meeting will be at USC again, on a date to be announced. Topics for next meeting:
CherryPy tutorial (if Greg can make it)
- SimpleTAL and Pyrex tutorials (Diane)
- Others?