[NCLUG] ANN: Fort Collins Pythonistas Kickoff Meeting - 6 Nov 2008 @ 6 pm

[Sean Reifschneider]

Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> What software will we need?

All you will *NEED* is the base Python environment, preferably version 2.6,
though anything older than this will be usable though with some
corner-cases being unavailable.

Some sort of editor will probably make your life easier, particularly
something that does Python syntax highlighting.  I will probably use vim
for basic editing.  See:

   http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors

I will use ipython for most of my examples because it's a very nice
interactive Python environment.  So you may want this as well.

For an IDE I expect to be using wingware, which is commercial software with
a free trial available:

   http://wingware.com/wingide/trial

Another IDE like IDLE (which is free) may be basically as useful, but I
honestly don't use IDEs much so I can't honestly say.  Why Wing?  I had a
hard time deciding on this, because it's commercial.  However, they do have
a free version available, as well as trials, it's a "best of breed" IDE,
and the Wing folks are very active in the community.

I'm still deciding exactly what I want to do for materials, but I'll
probably use Dive Into Python, which has a free download, or is around $40
for a hard-copy.

> I know I can do Python in a terminal on a Linux box, but what
> IDE, if any, is suggested?

Answered above.

> What if people will be using a Mac or, gasp, windows computer?

Shouldn't be a problem...  Python is available for basically everything.
Wing IDE is supported on all the above, and I think Stephan of Wing uses
MacOS as his primary system.  Python core developers use all of the above.

> Also, I read recently that Python released version 3 and that it wasn't
> entirely compatible with prior versions. Which version will we be looking at
> and if it's version 3 is there a special upgrade we need? If we are just
> learning should we be learning 3 so we don't have to "unlearn" later or is
> it too early to worry about that?

I decided to avoid Python 3.0 because it's just so new.  The thing about
version 3 is that it's deliberately incompatible with previous releases, so
that the developers can fix long-standing warts that have remained because
of compatibility.

However, this means that currently the amount of software that runs under
Python 3 is quite limited.  One of the benefits of Python is that there is
such a rich set of additional software and libraries around it, for doing
things like GUIs, web development, network programming, games...  Most if
not all of this software is unavailable under Python 3.0 right now.

So, if you were to pick up Python 3 right now, you'd have what's in the
standard library, which is pretty good, but you'd be missing out on a lot
of things.  The Python community has a plan to bridge this gap, via the 2.6
release.  2.6 is backwards compatible with 2.6, but also includes features
making it easy to build code that will run on both Python 2.6 and 3.0.  2.6
just came out, and so this porting effort has really only just begun.  In a
year, it would probably be reasonable to start looking at teaching Python
3, but right now it is not.

You can definitely start developing 2.6 code that will be able to be easily
(probably automatically) ported to 3.  And it's not like someone who knows
Python 2.6 is going to have a lot of problems going to 3.0.  It's not like
learning a completely new language.  It won't be a huge learning curve.

> Also very cool. Should we plan on pitching in and will there be non-meat
> options?

While I do eat meat, I have no problems eating non-meat choices.  So, I
would support non-mean selection.  tummy.com will put in $100 towards the
food and beverage fund.

Sean
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability

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