From Python Import Podcast

This is the first of two episodes where we’re going to explore PEP 20, that is, The Zen of Python.

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Real show notes to follow. With links and everything.

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Welcome to the first episode of the podcast! These, my friends, are the Show Notes.

Introduction to Your Hosts

• David Stanek @dstanek on Twitter
• Mike Crute @mcrute on Twitter
• Chris Miller @codeshaman on Twitter / codeshaman on Identi.ca

PyCon 2010 Reflections

• Mike and Chris were impressed by the community and the group focus
• Ruby sucks. Mike said it. Bring it, kids.
• Titus likes Distribute and Pip. Who knows why?
• What can we learn from PyCon for regional conferences like PyOhio?
• Dave’s done a lot of thinking about testing
• He finds that nothing lets him test the way he wants.
• He uses nose, mock, and dingus
• Mote might be good for BDD, but Dave finds it lacking.
• Dave hates documentation. Tests could be like documentation, and would be more accurate over time.
• Mote parses the output more like a narrative, almost like a spec, instead of …..F….
• We work with a large system, and rest assured, code is not documentation. Tests could be.
• Oh..we ramble about this for a while. PyCon? What’s PyCon? Oh…right…the Testing BOF.
• There was a Testing Goat. Terry Peppers is somehow responsible for it. Mike Pirnat needed one. Gary Bernhardt was the goat. We want pictures. ‘Nuff said?
• Look into Mike’s .vimrc. Behold the wonder.
• Right. PyCon. Remember Pycon? David Beazley’s talk on the GIL was dead sexy.
• The Brandon Rhodes’ discussion of the Dictionary Object. Awesome.
• Chris thought Titus’s talk on Continuous Integration frameworks was great.
• Oh look. Back to testing. We like talking about testing. Look for a show or two on testing. Wait! Don’t leave!
• Chris was impressed with the diversity of the community and how friendly people were.
• And about the vendors. What did we think about the vendors? We like Swag. And sometimes we buy books. And hats.
• “I use vim, so I don’t really need an IDE.” Flame. Discuss.
• We generally have a good opinion of companies using open source and who participate in the community.
• We enjoyed hacking together, especially on Mike’s snakeplan.
• We need DCVS achievements. Like games. But better.
• Catherine Devlin’s cmd2 was sweet.
• You might be eaten by a grue.
• Python is used by the military to create simulations. Thanks, Eric Silverman!
• Atlanta, however, was…meh. We’d prefer Cleveland. We’re not biased. Nope. And it’s not Detroit, right?

Closing

• Contact us by leaving a comment or by emailing feedback [at] frompythonimportpodcast.com
• What topics do you want? Who do you want to hear from? Let us know!
• Our Identi’ca group is fpip
• Let Steve Holden know we’d love a bottle of Scotch.

Housekeeping

• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
• The music is Codemonkey, provided by Jonathan Coulton.