IronPython was one of the factors that impacted my decision to attend PyCon. Microsoft are approaching the release of version 2.0 which will have parity with CPython 2.5. The production versions already are close to full Python 2.4 support making it a viable platform for use in a lot of places where I would typically use C#.

Going into the conference I was looking forward to the Sunday session with Jim Hugunin but there turned out to be some more treats for the IronPython developer. Feihong Hsu ran a session on Python.NET and how you can bridge from CPython to the .NET platform, taking advantage of rich Windows APIs. Michael Foord spoke on Silverlight as well as his company’s spreadsheet which embeds IronPython.

Feihong organised an open space session for Saturday evening after the PyWin32 gathering to talk about Python.NET and we were joined by the IronPython developers and management (Dino Viehland, Harry Pierson, Jim Hugunin and others). We discussed a number of aspects of IronPython and progress towards the 2.0 release. It looks like this may be complete in October given that they released the first beta last week. Again Michael Foord had something interesting to say on what Resolver Systems are doing.

Michael presented an open source project called IronClad. This is quite an insane assortment of code from C# to Python to assembler all in the name of accessing Python modules written in C. To date they have the bzip2 module running but are working on support for modules like NumPy which are important to their customers.

After the open space session we headed into Chicago for dinner at India House. This gave us a chance to find out some more stuff about the IronPython implementation, and other factoids. Dino hinted that he was working on getting Django up and running. Little did we know he was going to be demoing this to the crowd on Sunday.

Sunday saw Jim’s big talk and I managed to get a few photos. It wasn’t easy, but I think these turned out a bit better than earlier shots at the conference. Dino showed off the fairly minimal changes needed to get Django running on IronPython and Jim demoed the IronPython interpreter running under Dynamic Silverlight.

After the keynote, Dino gave a me a quick run through of the IronPython and DLR source code. This was very interesting and it gave me a real step up in understanding what goes on under the covers. Thanks Dino!

Friday was the opening day of the Python conference - it was also Pi Day (3/14). I headed off to the keynotes hoping to find out a bit more about what is happening with Py3k (or Python 3.0 as it will probably be called after release). David Goodger opened with some interesting stats. 2008 is the biggest PyCon and there are over 1000 attendees, a whopping 70% increase over 2007! They have a 45mb internet connection, so it’s a pity that it’s near impossible to connect to the Wifi.

The first keynote from White Oak Technologies was the story around their use of Python. As a consulting organisation they are presented with challenge when deploying Python solutions for clients. They outlined various ways that clients would push back on the use of Python and how they turned these into opportunities. Nothing really special here but it’s interesting to hear that people are having success when challenging other developers and management on the use of Python.

Up next was Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. His primary goal was to give us an update on the progress of Py3k and Python 2.6. Apparently both are scheduled for release in August. I would assume this is only tentative as they are only at the alpha stage at present. I knew the Python language had been in existence for some time, but I didn’t realise it actually started as an academic project in 1989.

It’s age appears to be part of the problem for Python in 2008. Design decisions around character encoding (no unicode by default) and locking in the interpreter are a contentious issue for a lot of people. The latter issue is not going to be fixed according to Guido but unicode is going to be the standard since there is less of a performance hit today.

Guido is still recommending the 2.x branch of Python for the next few years. Obviously there are performance and reliability concerns for early migration to 3.0. This is good to know since I know that IronPython will be able to key up with the pace of the CPython schedule.

Today was the Python tutorial day. Given that I haven’t spent a lot of time reading or writing Python code I thought it would be a good idea to attend some of these tutorials. Since they kicked off at 9am it was a bit of a challenge making it on time. My Southwest flight from Philly last night arrived late, and then I had a big trip around to the other side of Chicago. If you need to attend a conference near O’Hare, try to fly into that airport. All I wanted to do was to lie in bed for a few more hours

When I made my tutorial selections I was hoping to attend a Python for Java Developers session. This would have been useful given my experience with C# but it seems that I was in the minority and it was cancelled. I switched to the Django session but I think I may have been better attending the session on performance optimisation.

Registration wasn’t too busy today since the main conference crew won’t arrive till Friday. I got a PyCon bag and some flyers but the T-Shirts weren’t ready. Apparently they’ll be available tomorrow, I’d hate to miss out on one!

Python 101 Tutorial (Steve Holden)

It turns out that Steve was another British ex-pat living here in the US. It gets weirder in that he lectured at Manchester University for a number of years. Given Steve’s position in the community I expected a sharp introduction to Python. It didn’t disappoint and I picked up a fair bit. The ’slice’ mechanism looks really useful, I wonder if it can be implemented with any of the new C# features?

Getting Started with Django (Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

I was expecting this session to be a little more exciting. Jacob has some fine ideas about how Python frameworks should be built but his presentation style is not as striking as DHH. Since this was an introductory session I can’t complain too much but I really want to hear some more about Django deployment and debugging over the next few days.

Internet Programming with Python (Wesley Chun)

At this point I was pretty exhausted. This tutorial seemed to be geared toward newbies to network programming, rather than a best practice session on leveraging Python for internet programming.