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Python Conference Coming Soon
nnorwitz writes "PyCon 2004 is coming to Washington, DC at the end of March. It's a great place to meet lots of smart people and learn new things. Many interesting discussions go far beyond Python into other programming languages and topics. We should find out more about the Pie-thon, the OSAF since Mitch Kapor is the keynote speaker. There may even be a few surprises. The price is only $175, but early bird registration ends soon. It's not too late to submit a presentation either. I hope to see lots of new faces this year! I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers. :-)"
Sorry, Python is a lot better than Perl but then again so's VB, eh?
.. what they fail to mention is, one way *per Python version*.
.. why the heck don't we all just call obj.__repr__() directly? And do we really need *four* underscores? And do we really need to type 'self' all the time???" At that moment, the Rubification will begin.
The Python community is turning into a bizarre mirror-image of the Perl community: full of themselves and a little too eager to show off the latest "trick" you can do in Python.
I read Python books/sites and they say with a straight face "the great thing about Python is there's only one way to do things"
I first used Python at 1.5 when it was pushed as a "prototyping language". I'm not coming back until they finish figuring out their object model and scoping rules.
Someday, a bright Pythoner will get hit by lightning and realize, "hey, str(obj) just calls obj.__repr__()
Sincerely,
Ruby Zealot
Sure there are a lot of similarities, but I prefer Ruby's purer OO model and I don't prefer Python's whitespace as syntax requirements and the need to type self everywhere (not to mention all those underscores). And where's the fun in there's only one way to write it?
Python definately has some advantages over Perl, but as a Rubyist, it doesn't offer me any advantages that would convince me to switch.
'Different strokes for different folks' as they say down at the retirement center
I like a *lot* of what I see in Ruby, and I strongly agree with your criticisms of Python (though I'm still undecided about the whitepace issue.)
Even so, I think Matz's attitude about Unicode and internationalization rules Ruby out as a serious candidate for me.
All Windows and Macs machines being sold today already use Unicode. The Unix world is in last place but the conversion is happening almost everywhere. The very last holdout against Unicode will probably be the Unix-style OSes in Japan. While all other platforms are Unicode and most of the Unix world is converted, they will be the last of the legacy holdouts.
Japanese *nix is also the center of Matz's focus, and it shows. He has made it clear that the principal driving force behind Ruby's design is to help him do his own Japanese work in an encoding (EUC-JP) that he says is "good enough for me [him]". Since EUC-JP doesn't support anything well except for Japanese, he clearly doesn't internationalize his own work, and his comments make it pretty clear that anyone who does want to follow modern internationalization practices had better look elsewhere for a language.
Also, the libraries in Ruby are far less developed than in Python, and I don't see them getting "good enough" anytime soon. Matz's Japanese Unix-centric community just hasn't produced the libraries that the rest of us are beginning to demand from our production languages.
If I were just tinkering around with personal utilities and if legacy subset charsets were good enough for my text needs, then it might be all right. But I need lots of big, solid, production quality libraries for Unicode-based commercial systems, and Ruby isn't close. (Even Python is a stretch.)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
All of the Python core team (including Guido until recently) live in DC. Granted, it's better if the conference was held in Vegas, on a cruise ship or in Monaco parhaps, but you're forgetting that the organizers of it are volunteers and do not get paid. The days when you could get a sponsor to shell out a few hundred grand to fly everyone to Vegas are gone.
DC is home to places like NASA, NIST, NIH... Quite a few well known open source folk live out this way.
I don't get out much these days, but before the .com craze, there were quite a few interesting places for programmers to meet. The DCLUG (past meetings) was one of them. I don't know what the status of the DCLUG is these days, but I remember Linus's talk in 95, this is way before most people even heard of Linux.
Ruby2 will have Unicode support. Read this.