What Makes Python AWESOME?

Author

  • Raymond Hettinger (@raymondh)

Context for Success

  • OS License

  • Commercial distributions
    • Sponsor advancements
  • Zen
    • Guides the language and community
  • Community
    • Killer feature
  • Repositories (Pypi)
    • Solved problems are a pip install away.

High level qualities

  • Ease of learning
    • Can build a Python programmer in a week and a half
  • Rapid Dev Cycle
    • Used in a high frequency trading company
    • More important to react to market

  • Economy of Expression

  • Readability and Beauty
    • Makes it easy to work in, and less tiring
  • One way to do it
    • Once you learn an aspect, you can apply it somewhere else

A bit of Awesomeness

  • Five minutes to write code to find duplicate files.

  • Can throw away.

  • How long to write in C?
    • Infinite
    • You won’t write it
    • Python programmers write things C programmers won’t.

  • Just the same as any other scripting language?

Why is Python Awesome?

Indentation

  • How we write psuedocode
  • Contributes to readability
  • Shows an example of indentation in C lying

Iterator protocol

  • Lots of stuf is iterable
  • Hold the language together
  • sets, lists, dicts, files
  • shows sorted(set(‘abracadabra’))
  • sorted(set(open(filename)))
  • Like legos: fit together perfectly
  • Shows an analogy between that and Unix pipes.
  • Not enough, GOF pattern

List Comprehension

  • More flexibile than functional style

Generators

  • Easiest way to write an iterator
  • Adds one keyword (yield)
  • Makes tricky iterators easy

Generator Expressions

  • Produce values just-in-time
  • sum(x**3 for x in xrange(1000000))
  • In Pypy, roughly C speed
  • setcomps and dictcomps

Generators that accept Input

  • generators support send(), throw(), and close()
  • Unique to Python
  • Can make Twisted’s inline deferreds using this
  • A state machine with callbacks.
  • Write code that looks procedural, but uses callbacks
  • Monocle (https://github.com/saucelabs/monocle), Twisted inline deferred
  • Fantastic improvement of callback code.

Decorators

  • Expressive
  • Always worked for function
  • Initial response: Syntactic sugar
  • Community rose up and demanded it from Guido.
  • Easy on the eyes
  • Shows example using itty (https://github.com/toastdriven/itty) using decorators for routing.
  • Ping into another machine using curl to lookup environment variables in 3 lines.
  • Web service in 20 lines, made possible by decorators
  • Thanks Django!

With Statement

  • Clean, elegant
  • Profoundly important
  • Sandwich analogy
  • Subroutines factor out the ‘meat’ of the code
  • With statments factor out the ‘bread’ of the code
  • Factors out common setup and teardown methods.

Abstract Base Classes

  • Uniform definition of what it means to be a sequence, mapping, etc.

  • Ability to override isinstance() and issubclass()

  • Duck-typing says: “If it says it’s a duck...”

  • Mixin capability (DictMixin)

  • Can provide the base of a class
    • shows using a list-based set with __iter__, __contains__, and something else
    • Mixin provides the rest