Notes from PySIG, 17-December-2008: Porting to Python 3.0, holiday cookies

[Shawn O'Shea]

Rats! For some reason I thought this was next week. I've been swamped
between work, finishing the semester and not having power for a few days
(sorry to hear some folks are *still* without). Anyway, sounds like I missed
a decent meeting. Oh well, there's always next month

-Shawn

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:

> Six folks attended the December meeting of the Python Special Interest
> Group, held on the irregular third Wednesday in December to allow for
> the festivities next week. (We normally meet the fourth Thursday, same
> place, same time.)
>
> There wasn't a formal agenda, and discussion was first the ice storms of
> last week and everyone's power status.
>
> I talked with Bill about setting up my new Sansa player with Rockbox and
> using gPodder in Fedora10 to sync music. The gPodder Podcast client can
> sync with using the standard file-based method or by using the Media
> Transfer Protocol popular in many players. To run with gPodder, I needed
> to install libMTP and PyMTP [1] (there's a Python connection!) I also
> discovered while importing RSS feeds that there's a bug in Fedora 10's
> version of Mark Pilgrim's awesome feedparser, fairly easy to patch,
> documented here [0]. It's an arguable bug; it may be that feedparser
> throws an error instead of behaving more gracefully when hander RSS that
> might not be fully valid, in this case apparently a bad Unicode
> character. Perhaps not fully following Goodwin's Law (paraphrased, "
>
> Arc had sent a link, "If Languages were Religions" [2], which included
> the suggestion, "Python would be Humanism: It's simple, unrestrictive,
> and all you need to follow it is common sense. Many of the followers
> claim to feel relieved from all the burden imposed by other languages,
> and that they have rediscovered the joy of programming. There are some
> who say that it is a form of pseudo-code. " Read the whole post; there
> are some good ones!
>
> Bill Freeman had an idea he'd like to float for a project to avoid name
> contention issues, using a naming scheme similar to Java's com.sun....
> namespace for individual projects. Kent dug around in the
> comp.lang.python archives for some previous threads on the subject to
> review what had been said on the issue before.
>
> Kent wanted to talk about Python 3.0! Shawn had sent a link to the list
> [3] for Python porting resources, but wasn't able to make the meeting.
> We discussed some of the issues with porting 2.x Python code to Python
> 3.0 and tested out the 2to3 program. Arc and Matt arrived and joined in
> the conversation. We first converted the canonical "hello world" program
> and worked up to Bill's telephone list program, Arc suggested jinja [4],
> and an unpublished project that Kent had been working on involving
> recognizing human languages, each of which had gradually more and more
> complex issues. The 2to3 program won't always make working code, but it
> does a fine first pass in making all of the well-known changes in
> converting a 2.x program to 3.0. In running the programs through 2to3
> and examining the results, the group had a good discussion about some of
> the syntax and structural changes in 3.0
>
> Thanks to Bill Sconce for organizing the meeting and bringing the milk,
> to Janet for the wonderful airplane cookies, to the Amoskeag Business
> Incubator for providing us with the great facilities and to all for
> attending and participating.
>
>
> [0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477024
> [1] http://nick125.com/projects/pymtp.html
> [2]
> http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html
> [3] http://pyside.blogspot.com/2008/12/python-3-porting-resources.html
> [4] http://jinja.pocoo.org/
>
>
> --
>
> Ted Roche
> Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
> http://www.tedroche.com
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>
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