[Edu-sig] more about Pycon

[kirby urner]

Here's a major theme of Pycon for me, something I learned:

ACID-compliant SQL is a wonderful tool and many Python APIs backend
into those to great positive benefit.

However, with cloud and network programming, there's inherent
asynchrony and sometimes "eventual consistency" is all you need, i.e.
that "right now and always" flavor of ACID is something you're willing
to trade away (called "dropping ACID") in exchange for other benefits.

So the age of network programming with widely distributed server
architectures is taking us into a post-SQL world, not in the sense
that SQL is going away, but in the sense that it's definitely not the
best answer to every prayer.

Deciding which non-SQL tools you might need and which Python APIs go
with it is as much a twisting tree as the SQL world's is.  I think
this is a good focus for user groups, as been of ours in Portland (not
just in Python circles, but like in Admirers of JavaScript, another
group meeting at CubeSpace I've joined).

Here's one of my blog write-ups:
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/03/patterns-in-python.html

I also wanted to again express my appreciation for Jeff Rush's talk,
which I'm going to study a lot more.  Steve Holden's segment on the
difference between iterators and iterables and how to turn the latter
into the former was also a paradigm of clear teaching (that guy is a
master).

My blog post around Jeff's talk is sort of "student notes" in style,
gives the idea but the slides are what you really want to check out
(adding link):
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/03/about-python-namespaces.html

Speaking of Wikis, I'd love to see one of those VLAM enabled ones
linked from edu-sig and have our edu-sig community submit to it as a
sandbox or playground (in addition to supporting PyWHIP etc.).

Kirby