November, 28 2007

Caught a number of interesting sessions yesterday:

• Adam Kennedy spoke animatedly on the topic of CPAN 1.5. I have only an abstract interest in the CPAN as a colossal piece of software engineering, but Adam is always amusing.
• Josh Heumann’s Intermediate Perl Testing turned out to be more about testing than Perl. Lots of good advice for organisations that don’t yet have testing as part of their culture.
• Google’s own Leslie Hawthorn, Geek Shepherd, spoke about the Google Summer of Code program, which she manages, and then launched a similar program for High School students, Google Highly Open Participation Contest. My eldest is just one year too young to join in this year – next year for sure.
• Paul Fenwick’s dinner talk, An Illustrated History of Failure was funny, interesting and geeky. Everything a dinner talk should be.

And after dinner, went out with a crowd from Sydney. We drank lemonade and ginger ale.

Anthony Baxter, Python release manager, filled us in on the state of Python:

• 2.5.2 is coming and will be a bug-fix release.
• Moving from 2.x to 3.0
  • There will be a -Wpy3k flag for 2.6 which will warn of constructs incompatible with Py3K.
  • 2.6 will have “from future import” new features.
  • There will be a -3 flag to enable all future features.
  • There will be a “2to3” converter to programatically convert Python 2.x to 3.0.
• 2.6 final will come at about the same time as 3.0 final. There will be a 2.7. after that.
• 3.0 is not a rewrite.
  • The Python guys claim to have learnt from the Perl6 experience.
  • 3.0 is about throwing out junk, removing mistakes and adding new features.
• Big new 3.0 features:
  • print is now a function.
  • The <> not equals operator is going away.
  • String exceptions are going away.
  • All strings are now unicode.
  • Iterators are being used in many places where lists used to be returned, e.g dict.keys().
  • Parameters and return values can be annotated.
  • Absolute imports will be the default.
• There will be a standard library reorganisation, with lots of culling and renaming.
• 3.0 is nominally due for release August-September 2008, but Anthony thinks it might take a bit longer.