PyCon Day 3

This morning is the start of PyCon day 3. Bruce Eckel , of Thinking in [some language] fame (if fame is the right word), is giving the keynote. Bruce and I sprinted together last year at the Zope 3 sprint, and he’s a very smart man. His presentation is titled How to Argue About Types , which since he’s written about C++, Java and Python, he probably understands.

He’s starting out with a small report from the Software Development conference, which he attended last week. Apparently Java threads have always been broken. Who knew. I knew that Java threads changed with each JDK, but never knew why. Now I do: they just can’t get them “right”.

The D Language was another area of interest at the SDC, and Bruce claims that it often runs faster than C and is still compiled to native code. It includes built in unit testing and garbage collection as well. Definitly something to look into.

Now on with the show. Today’s sessions are a little less focused on my core areas of interest, but that’s OK. There’s a session at the end of the day I’m looking forward to on MacPython . I’m interested in finding out what’s different about it and how I can use it.

After the sessions, we’re heading right to the airport and with any amount of luck we’ll be back in Fort Wayne around 9:30 this evening. We’re leaving the hotel at 3:15, so we’ll hopefully be at the airport at least 2 hours before our flight leaves, and hopefully that’ll be enough time. I have my doubts, but then that’s to be expected.