Skip to main content

Python at the .NET user group

I was invited to present on Python and IronPython at the Northern Utah .NET User Group last night. I spent the majority of the time on Python itself, guessing (correctly, with the exception of a couple Zope users) that most people wouldn't know anything about Python beyond having heard of it.

There was a lot of participation. It ended up lasting about 90 minutes, with a lot of Q&A throughout. I enjoyed myself and I think most of the .NET guys did too.

Thanks for the chance to speak! A PDF of my slides is up here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nice presentation. Here's a question about the quick sort example:

What is the name of the idiom for this construction?

(lt for lt in l[1:] if lt < l[0])

That doesn't seem to work in python 2.3.5. (Am I mistaken?)
Jonathan Ellis said…
those are generator expressions, introduced in 2.4.

(there's actually a bug there; I was trying to be clever and didn't test it. You'd need to add L = list(L) at the top of qsort for it to work with the gen exps; better would be to stick with list comprehensions. alas.)
Anonymous said…
Nice presentation.

----------------------
Automating applications with Python

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...

Python at Mozy.com

At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas...