The 2017 Python Language Summit is coming!

The Python Language Summit is an annual day-long meeting of CPython core developers.  It’s a highly technical meeting, designed to explore and resolve existing discussions regarding the Python programming language, the development of its reference implementation CPython, and the impact of the language’s evolution on the existing alternative implementations.  It’s a once-a-year opportunity for Python’s core development team to get together in a room and work things out.

The meeting is kept small on purpose, as we think that maximizes its productivity and effectiveness.  Nearly all attendees are CPython core developers, but we do accept presentations from anyone in the greater Python community who has something interesting to say to the core developers.  And that could be you!

In order to be eligible, you must be able to attend the Summit in person.  The Summit will be held May 17 2017, all day, in the same convention center where PyCon itself is held.  You have to get there yourself; we literally have no discretionary budget to help people attend the Summit.  However, you don’t have to buy a ticket to PyCon in order to attend the summit--it’s a completely separate event, and it’s free!

But mere eligibility is not enough.  The presentations are carefully hand-picked by the Language Summit organizers, and must be exceedingly relevant and of high quality in order to be considered.  The Summit only comes once a year, and we the organizers want to keep it interesting and maximally productive for the developers who are kind enough to attend.  To be brutally honest, we expect most proposals from non-core-developers will be turned down--again, sorry.

PyCon is large, diverse, welcoming, and vibrant, and there are lots of great avenues (e.g. lightning talks, BoFs, open spaces, etc.) for discussing Python-related topics.  If your proposed talk isn't accepted for the Language Summit, we highly encourage you to explore these other options.


Here are the criteria you should keep in mind if you submit a presentation:

• Is this a question about the *design* of Python?  Or, to a lesser extent, the implementation of CPython or one of the alternative implementations?  The Summit is about Python itself--we don’t discuss other projects.
• Is this a *technical* debate?  The Python universe is large and diverse, but the Summit is explicitly a highly technical meeting, and a deeper technical context on the part of participants is essential.
• Is this topic going to spark conversation?  A good rule of thumb: your presentation should raise questions, not provide answers.  If your topic could be adequately covered in a blog post, it’s probably not interactive enough.
• Is this already an ongoing discussion in the Python development community?  As a rule the Language Summit is not a venue for new business--it’s for working through existing technical debates.
• Is this topic going to be interesting to a lot of people?  While it doesn’t have to be universally interesting, it can’t be too narrow either.  As a rule, most people in the room should be interested.
• Is this a topic that’s still considered "open" by the core developers?  There’s no point in proposing a talk saying "you should abandon Python 3 and go back to 2", or even "you should make a Python 2.8".  From the perspective of the core developers, these are resolved, closed issues.

Examples of interesting topics:

• Python’s new async syntax is flawed, here’s why
• The design of CPython’s extension API makes it difficult to do what we want it to do
• My patch for CPython makes it ten times faster for common workloads
• I’m engaged in a lively and long-lived discussion on python-dev and I want to bring it up with the core devs in person, so that a resolution can be found

Examples of irrelevant / uninteresting / ineligible topics:

• A useful Python library you want people to know about
• A new language feature you want to propose
• There’s a bug in CPython you want to raise awareness about
• The Python community needs to...

The process for submitting a talk proposal is exactly the same as for core developers: fill out the Google form with your contact information, your affiliation, and a summary of your proposal.  The form is reachable via the Language Summit page under the PyCon events menu:

https://us.pycon.org/2017/events/language-summit/

Since this wider call for proposals comes so late in the process, we’re extending the deadline for submissions.  The deadline is now Thursday, April 20th, 2017, two weeks from today.  If your submission is accepted, we will notify you by May 1st.

Finally, even if you don’t get to attend, stay tuned to Linux Weekly News (LWN) in the days and weeks following the Language Summit.  Jake Edge from LWN has done a fantastic job of reporting on the Language Summit the previous two years, and is planning on attending and reporting on it again this year.  We all look forward to his thorough reporting of the event!



[BL]arry

(Barry Warsaw and Larry Hastings)