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From Software:

PyCon and Django

Saturday, March 15 2008 UTC

Went to the first day of PyCon yesterday, mostly for the Django talks but also because Python is so huge in my/our work.

A few things jumped out at me (aside from the sheer overwhelming numbers of geeky, mostly white, mostly male hackers).

During Adrian Holovaty’s “State of Django” talk he asked how many people had used or been using Django in the last year. At least half the hands of the audience went up (and this was by far the biggest of the parallel sessions, with several hundred people in the room). My impression is that Django really does have the most traction in the Python Web application community now. Even the notional TurboGears talk used Django templates in the examples! The upgrades to Django, mostly dealing with database capabilities, Unicode, or the admin interface, look nice but not earth-shattering. The 1.0 release is expected Real Soon Now but it seems the code base is pretty stable already (at least in terms of overall functionality).

A couple of other observations:

  1. Lots of interest in NumPy, and lots of scientific software developers at PyCon.
  2. Guido gave a keynote address. “Python 3000” will be a modest but important upgrade to the language, cleaning up several design quirks; and will break a lot of existing code
  3. There is still a lot of interest in Jython, which surprised me. One of the Jython developers told me it’s as fast or faster than CPython right now, which surprised me more. Almost all of Django works on Jython now. This might have interesting implications for the Web development community given this kind of platform.
Other than that, most of the talks were either stuff I knew (occasionally), stuff that was more detail than I cared about (usually), or stuff about Company X which is doing really cool thing Y in trendy, fun locale Z and why don’t you come work for us?

Oh, and lots of free T-shirts, including a very cool one from Leapfrog Online showing the output of thousands of unit tests passing on the front and back of the shirt. I’m wearing it now. (Geek!)