TITLE: PyCon Day 1
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 22, 2023  6:38 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:

 One of great benefits of a virtual conference is accessibility.  I
 can hop from Iowa to Salt Lake City with the press of a button.
 The competing cost to virtual conference is that I am accessible
 ... from elsewhere.

 On the first day of PyCon, we had a transfer orientation session
 that required my presence in virtual Iowa from 10:00 AM-12:00 noon
 local time.  That's 9:00-11:00 Mountain time, so I missed Ned
 Batchelder's keynote and the opening set of talks.  The rest of the
 day, though, I was at the conference.  Virtual giveth, and virtual
 taketh away.

 <b>Talk 1: Inside CPython 3.11's New Specializing, Adaptive Interpreter</b>

 As I said yesterday, I don't know Python -- tools, community, or
 implementation -- intimately.  That means I have a lot to learn
 in any talk.  In this one, Brandt Bucher discussed the adaptive
 interpreter that is part of Python 3.11, in particular how the
 compiler uses specialization to improve its performance based on
 run-time usage of the code.

 Midway through the talk, he referred us to a talk on tomorrow's
 schedule.  "You'll find that the two talks are not only complementary,
 they're also mutually recursive."   I love the idea of mutually
 recursive talks!  Maybe I should try this with two sessions in
 one of my courses.  To make it fly, I will need to make some videos...
 I wonder how students would respond?

 This
 <a href="https://www.dis-this.com/">
    online Python disassembler</a>
 by @pamelafox@fosstodon.org popped
 up in the chat room.  It looks like a neat tool I can use in my
 compiler course.  (Full disclosure: I have been following Pamela on
 Twitter and Mastodon for a long time.  Her posts are always
 interesting!)

 <b>Talk 2: Build Yourself a PyScript</b>

 PyScript is
 <a href="https://pyscript.net">
    a Javascript module</a>
 that enables you to embed Python
 in a web page, via WebAssembly.  This talk described how PyScript
 works and showed some of the technical issues in writing web apps.

 Some of this talk was over my head.  I also do not have deep
 experience programming in the web.  It looks like I will end up
 teaching a beginning web development course this fall (more later),
 so I'll definitely be learning more about HTML, CSS, and Javascript
 soon.  That will prepare me to be more productive using tools like
 PyScript.

 <b>Talk 3: Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)</b>

 Our test suites are often not strong enough to recognize changes
 in our code.  The talk introduced mutation testing, which modifies
 code to test the suite.  I didn't take a lot of notes on this one,
 but I did make a note to try mutation testing out, maybe in
 Racket.

 <b>Talk 4: Working with Time Zones: Everything You Wish You Didn't Need to Know</b>

 Dealing with time zones is one of those things that every software
 engineer seems to complain about.  It's a thorny problem with both
 technical and social dimensions, which makes it really interesting
 for someone who loves software design to think about.

 This talk opened with example after example of how time zones
 <em>don't</em> behave as straightforwardly as you might think, and
 then discussed Python's newest time zone library, <tt>pytz</tt>.

 My main takeaways from this talk: <tt>pytz</tt> looks useful, and I'm
 glad I don't have to deal with time zones on a regular basis.

 <b>Talk 5: Pythonic Functional (iter)tools for your Data Challenges</b>

 This is, of course, a topic after my heart.  Functional programming
 is a big part of my programming languages course, and I like being
 able to show students Python analogues to the Racket ideas they are
 learning.  There was not much new FP content for me here, but I did
 learn some new Python functions from <tt>itertools</tt> that I can
 use in class -- and in my own code.
 
 I enjoyed the Advent of Code segment of the talk, in which the
 speaker applied Python to some of the 2021 challenges.  I use an
 Advent of Code challenge or two each year in class, too.  The early
 days of the month usually feature fun little problems that my
 students can understand quickly.  They know how to solve them
 imperatively in Python, but we tackle them functionally in Racket.

 Most of the FP ideas needed to solve them in Python are similar, so
 it was fun to see the speaker solve them using <tt>itertools</tt>.
 Toward the end, the solutions got heavy quickly, which must be how
 some of my students feel when we are solving these problems in class.

 ~~~~~

 Between work in the morning and the conference afternoon and evening,
 this was a long day.  I have a lot of new tools to explore.
-----