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Guido's OSCON Python keynote

Guido has posted his powerpoint slides in the usual location. (Opens fine in OpenOffice.) The slides are mostly the same as the ones from EuroPython a month ago; here are the main differences:

  • Some odd slides during the introduction (anyone who was there care to explain these?)
  • language data scraped from sf.net -- or you could just look at this page; no need to scrape and piss off SF for something this simple. (Poor Dylan -- even less projects than Cobol -- 2 vs 4.)
  • "What does this buy us" slides added to 342 (generator) and 343 (with) PEP discussion (highly recommended if you haven't been following python-dev religiously)
  • Exception reform discussion

Personally, the "with" statement excites me the most. The exception cleanup is overdue but less sexy. :)

The static typing subject has been talked to death but I'll add my two cents.

Basically, it's a bad idea because it kills duck typing by requiring interfaces like "iterable"--a horrible idea even if all stdlib classes grow corresponding interfaces. The repeated realizations that I can't use a library because its author didn't bother making interfaces for the basic classes involved is a large reason I don't feel comfortable in static languages anymore.

"Adaptation" solves that problem in theory; in practice, having to create adapters to convince Python to treat my objects as ducks would be a noxious imposition. Code that exists only to convince the runtime that I know what I'm doing is un-Pythonic.

On the other hand, I think it would be misleading for "x: file" to not perform any assertions at all, and therefore also a bad idea. Better than inflicting interfacitis on Python, though.

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