EuroPython 2010

Just got back from the EuroPython 2010 conference in Birmingham this week. See my day by day write up.

It was a change for me, my first language conference, as opposed to web platform or more academic one, enlivened by some very entertaining talks, from Martijn Fassen and the Guardian's Michael Brunton-Spall.

Other highlights included the clear educational style of Raymond Hettinger, who made open to me the internals of twisted, generators and many other things. Along with particularly relevant talks such as
Laurence Rowe's one on XDV which I could go back to work with the next day and immediately investigate as an ideal tool for using with a moodle, mahara, drupal, PHP mashup, via Apache mod_transform.

The spectrum of python users was wide including HPC (parallel processing), maths, games, robotics, cloud computing and the more familiar web uses and platforms.

Dominating was probably the more commercial Google App Engine / Django related stuff, followed by the more academic parallel processing / twisted contingent. One thing I felt was surprisingly absent was the software packaging, management area, which python dominates in the linux world. However maybe thats because sys-admins dont attend language conferences.

I gave a very bad lightning talk in a small effort to remedy this. Next time I will have to remember to decide what I am going to say ... rather than just make sure the slides work!

There was a distinct feeling that zope was on the wain, and that zope3 development was now just Grok, with enthusiasts battling on despite their dwindling numbers.

I guess that raised a concern that although Google's wholesale adoption of Python as its language of choice, and django as its web framework, are great for boosting its profile. There is the danger that it could become so Googlized that other python frameworks that compete in the same arena are drowned out, or that python becomes Google's language just like java is Oracle's.