Flying saucers in minecraft
recommend http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8
You can use map, reduce, list comprehensions and lambdas for most uses of itertools
though python 3, reduce() has moved to functools.reduce()
Computing GCSEs abandoned a few years ago, but now brought back. From Sept 2014 computing is compulsory from age of 4 to 16. Includes design and create basic programs from the age of 4
Speaker from “Computing in School” organisation
Python - could be taught from 10. Kids have to learn textual language.
Problem - many teachers have no computing education. Need support from professionals in schools.
http://www.euroscipy.org/ - in Cambridge, prob August 2014
Mark Shannon
Data representation
If you have data you need to know what it means. All data needs an encoding or it is just a stream of bytes with no meaning
python - a string has meaning, bytes don’t
bytes + encoding
/\ encode/decode \/
semantic data
Geoffery
Gail Ollis
PhD work - hidden impact of programmers’ psychological differences on software development
“Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do” Donald Knuth
wave 8” floppy disk around - 500 kb
story of test harness for naval radar built in 1978 - used 8” floppy - still used in updated systems in 1988, 1995
Moral: software can hang around for a hell of a long time
eGenix
wget https://downloads.egenix.com/python/install-pyrun
chmod +x install-pyrun
./install-pyrun
./bin/pyrun
Alex Moon @barthes_simpson
https://github.com/alex-moon/solr-play
Daniele Procide
Danny Watkins
Inspired by PyCon UK 2012. Always been a robot nut. Now make a cheap robot and have a robot shop, sold 20 of them.
orion explorer1 robot avoiding walls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElXsXAcqrUE
http://shop.orionrobots.co.uk - bare kit £55, complete £70
Jon Cage
OpenCV, C++ with Python bindings
types:
composition: tuple, namedtuple ...
enumerated data type
C: tagged union
Rust: enum
Is there a better way?
Christian technology camp, every August
Sarah Mount - will shortly be teaching bioinformatics with python - Sarah would like to know more about bioinformatics
Twisted for the Win website - good examples of twisted usage - http://twistedftw.org/
slides at http://pyconuk.net/Twisted
exactly one screenful of python that does something interesting
needs readme, put it on github
Larry Hastings
Problem with argparse - too verbose, too much boilerplate
didn’t like alternatives, created dryparse (python 3 only)
hg clone [-U] source [target]
def clone(source, target, U):
....