Notes from PySIG , 22-Jan-2009

[Ted Roche]

The twenty-second of the month was the fourth Thursday, the usual night
for the Python Special Interest Group[1] to meet at the Amoskeag
Business Incubator[2] in Manchester. Thirteen attendees made it to the
January meeting.

As usual, coordinator Bill Sconce had a printed agenda with lots of news
to go over. We had a round of introductions, though it was mostly a
gathering of the regulars. We talked about Gotchas! -- those little
surprises that pop up while working through the day --  and
"reverse-gotchas!" -- the ah-ha moments that bring enlightenment.

Kent Johnson presented his regular Kent's Korner presentation on context
managers and the with statement[3]. Kent's notes for this and all past
Kent's Korners can be found on his web site[4]. The with statement, long
with decorators and generators (see how the KK sessions build upon each
 other!) can make a very powerful and very pythonic addition to writing
python code.

Arc Riley made the main presentation, on writing extensions in C. Arc
was apparently one of the very first programmers to actually attempt to
build an extension from scratch in Python 3.0, as he found that some of
the key documentation was missing and some of the most important
declaration about structures can only be found by reading the source
code of Python itself. Arc documented his adventures for us, found a bug
report to the Python folks[5], and provided the group with a very useful
document of where the gotchas are, and some very useful bookmarks[6].

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting. Thanks to Janet for the
cookies and Ray for bringing the milk! Thanks to the Amoskeag Business
Incubator for the great facilities. And thanks to all for attending and
participating!

[1] http://www.pysig.org
[2] http://www.abi-nh.com/
[3] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00015.html
[4] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/index.html
[5] http://bugs.python.org/issue4614
[6] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PySIGArcRiley22Jan2009


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