PySIG notes, 26-July-2007

[Ted Roche]

Twelve attendees made it to the Amoskeag Business Incubator, despite
heavy traffic from the 5,441 fans attending Merchantsauto.com Stadium to
watch the New Hampshire Fisher Cats squeak out a 4-3 win over the New
Britain Rock Cats last night. You gotta have your priorities, right?

Despite Alex's unfortunate absence due to work, there was no lack of
material to cover. Kent Johnson delivered yet another in a fine series
of Kent's Korner presentations, talking about the gotchas of mutating
functions: list.sort() does not return a sorted list, but sorts in
place, a common coding error. Kent showed how the addition of several
new features in 2.4 and 2.5, key= and reverse allows for much simpler
and far faster sorts without needing to invoke your own slower
functions. Ken'ts kindly provided notes here: [2]

Without a main presentation, Bill Sconce kept the ball going
with lots of discussions of related materials:

- attendance at FOSSEd and Bill's presentation on Scripting 301
- David Goodger's Code like a Pythonista post [1]
- possible upcoming meeting topics, from basic databases to SQL Alchemy
- Maybe a javascript topic?
- and more.

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting, Kent for his off-the-cuff
presentation and Janet for the awesome un-birthday cookie!


[1] http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/handout.html
[2] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00007.html

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com