Python Panel

My panel yesterday at the SD Forum went quite well. I moderated a discussion with Alex Martelli, uber technical lead for Google, and Munwar Shariff, CTO and cofounder of Cignex. We followed a keynote by Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python who's now with Google, and the event was closed out with another Google keynote by Greg Stein, their engineering manager. When I took a poll of the audience, however, very few were from Google, which, I told them, made me even more impressed by Google (heck, as if Google would need to bring its own people to fill a room!).

Python is actually 16 years old, as Guido pointed out. He went through its history--what he borrowed and improved upon from ABC, a failed predecessor to Python. It's been a few years since I spoke to Guido, but seven years ago (!) I had invited him to be on my former magazine's editorial advisory panel, and he was a helpful contributor in our first group meeting. At that time, I recall his focus being primarily on Python for educational purposes. Now, the enterprise is at the forefront. Look no further than the Python.org pages for an impressive list of companies using the programming language, from Industrial Light and Magic to Ely Lilly.

Both of my panelists had plenty of interesting things to say. Here's a grab bag of them.

Alex:
--Python respects four of the five principles of C (except the preference for performance).
--He's exploring the differences between protocols and components, and has been pushing an issue along the protocol lines in the Python community.
--For empirical studies of programming productivity, check out the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany (though a cursory Googling does not reveal any obvious links to this).
--Regarding Ruby, Rails is the dominant web application framework for that language, whereas in the Python community the effort is more dispersed.
--He recommends reading the Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion even if you don't use Smalltalk for a view of how patterns look when you don't have to fight the language to achieve them.
--Politics still abound in the open source community, with battles over which tools and projects are truly open and which are seen as diabolically commercial and thus shunned despite their utility.

Munwar:
--Python has tremendous productivity advantages over other languages. An application that took them six months to write in Java took just a handful of weeks in Python.
--ArcGenXML is an interesting Python modeling tool.
--Plone is a content management system built in Python that he recommends. Twisted Python was also named as a notable event-driven networking framework.
--Python is pushing the component-based development envelope further than other languages, and its community of developers offers a richer array of truly platform-independent resources and libraries than others do.
--He mentioned sprints he's involved in, which are coding marathons where developers get together to make major headway on a project or open source effort "and then spend four hours drinking beer. They sleep on the plane trip home." I joked that this reminded me of Charles Simonyi's coding marathons on his yacht, which I'd once been told were nice, except that after a week you wanted to get the heck off that yacht.

Overall, the event flowed nicely. One thing I found interesting, on a personal note, was that I was still conversant in the field. It's only been a few weeks since I left the magazine, but, irrationally to be sure, I had felt like a curtain had dropped on all that knowledge, placing it out of my reach. Of course, that's not true--a decade's experience doesn't just evaporate, that's just my insecurity speaking. This event was a bit of validation, then.

Plus, I have learned so much as a public speaker over the years, from experience and observation: aspects like how to interact with the audience, keep conversations on target, put people at ease, stay out of the way of the experts and make things entertaining. I told my dad that afterwards, and he was gently mocking me, saying "I guess they still like you, they really like you" (a la Sally Field). But that's not the point. Anyone who's ever seen the amazing agile software development guru Bob Martin give a talk knows how goofy and delightful his antics are. If you just do irrelevant schtick, that's not helpful, of course. But if you've seen Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report do his interview bits, that takes skill--I mean, you can't script that stuff, and his wit is brilliant (from tonight's show: "Democratic takeover in 2006: An impossibility, or the ramblings of a syphilitic mind? Let's talk with our guest, Paul Begala.")! Along similar lines, I read an interesting piece in the New York Times the other day about a former astronaut, Col. R. Michael Mullane, who gives motivational talks at conferences. He had some great anecdotes, which rarely tie in directly to the topic of whatever conference he's keynoting at. Years ago, I saw Gen. Colin Powell do the same thing at a healthcare meeting.

The point is, sometimes you just need to put people in the right frame of mind to absorb the specialized knowledge of their field.