Ed Leafe writes:
> There's lots more, but that's all I can think of
> right now. Maybe Paul will chime in with his observations,
> too.
I'm pretty amazed at what they pulled off with this conference,
actually, given that it was completely volunteer-organized and
implemented.
The community is vibrant, and Python continues to improve. One
thing I really came away with is that even the greatest
Pythonistas realize that things like security and performance
really matter, and they are considering all kinds of
suggestions from very smart people in the community to address
these concerns. A few of the presentations were actually
presentations of papers that show things that can be done to
bring Python to the next level.
In other words, the Python language is evolving. It is not
dying. That is refreshing.
I would have liked to see more database and business application
and GUI stuff, but the reality is that the most users of Python
seem to come from academia and not the business world. However,
in the evenings there were "Birds of a Feather" sessions that
went well past 10pm and the database BOF attracted
approximately 20 people. A few of those people said things like
"we need the ease of Access or FileMaker". Someone else said
"We need a VB-like IDE." But, most people in the DB BOF seemed
to be low-level db-api implementors and not necessarily
database users, so the discussion was very technical.
I'll certainly go to the next Python conference, perhaps even
volunteering some of my time.
--
Paul
©2004 Paul McNett |
