Meeting Report - Seacoast - Python - 10 Apr

[Ben Scott]

Hi all,

  My thanks again to Rob Anderson for last night's SLUG (Seacoast LUG)
for a very educational meeting on Python (along with occasional brief
side trips for COBOL, LISP, Pascal, and other stuff).  I also
expressed my annoyance with Rob, because I'm too {lazy, busy,
stubborn} to learn another language right now, and after a brief
introduction, Python looks very interesting to me.

(SLUG website: http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug)

  It was a very interactive meeting.  Rob had a set of slides, but he
frequently jumped over to Emacs to show some code, or an xterm running
Python to show how some code *worked*.  I, at least, found this very
neat -- immediately after telling us about something, we got a chance
to see it work in practice.  This is doubtless more time consuming
than a simple talking presentation, but I think it really reinforced
what we were learning.

(Slides: http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/talks/python-intro.pdf/view)

  Rob finished up by talking about a Python toolkit called SQLAlchemy
(which I will abbreviate "SA").  SA looks *very* cool.  It lets you
use Python code to model data as objects, and handles all the database
interfacing for you.  This is much more than a simple database engine
abstraction -- you write Python code, not SQL code.  Possibly even
cooler, you can point SA at an existing database, and it will create
the Python objects for you from the database.  So you can use Python
code to manipulate a database, or use a database to create Python
code.

(SQLAlchemy website: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/)

-- Ben "I'm being attacked by a Python" Scott