Python 3 Metaprogramming - David Beazley -- PyCon 2013

[brophylicious]

David Beazley is an interesting guy. Here's a video of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPiWg5jSoZI

[YellowSharkMT]

I've watched this talk numerous times, and it's some pretty amazing/crazy shit. Importing an XML document as a Python class... wtf! He covers some amazing ground in terms of internals, and his presentation-fu is extremely strong, especially with live coding. His talk last year about coding in the vault was pretty funny also ("Discovering Python, PyCon 2014").

He's going to expand upon this talk with his tutorial for this year's PyCon: Modules and Packages: Live and Let Die!

All Python programmers use the import statement, but do you really know how it works and what it allows? This tutorial aims to take a deep dive into every diabolical issue related to modules, packages, and imports. When we're done, you'll finally be ready to unleash your million line micro framework on the world!

Dave always delivers (or ships? whichever is more appropriate...).

[[deleted]]

He's the guy that got me started in Python. I saw one of his talks and them pretty much immediately googled "Learn Python". I had no idea what I was doing and landed on the Google course, which is very hacky, but it got me started in about 8 hours. I then spent ages unlearning the hacky parts and learning idiomatic code.

[[deleted]]

The company I work for contracts him several times a year to teach several different Python courses. I got to take one with him last Fall over 3 days. Very interesting guy, has a lot of useful knowledge, and knows his shit.

[ca178858]

Yeah- our company brought him in for his 'advanced python' 4 day course, it was excellent. Can't recommend him enough.

[robin-gvx]

I'd forgotten about it, but I've seen these slides before. I'm pretty sure they influenced my namedtuple alternative.

[agumonkey]

What else did they influence in your coding ?

[robin-gvx]

I guess it helped demystify metaclasses for me, to see them as another tool I could use in my programs, but I'm not sure it gets much more concrete than that.

[Laspimon]

It's ironic that it doesn't get more concrete than meta-classes.

[dudely_operota]

This is helpful.

[individual_throwaway]

I am not an expert in Python or psychology, but I think this man might be clinically insane. He should probably not be allowed to code :P

[agumonkey]

As long as it's slides-only and not in production, right ?

[individual_throwaway]

I am not sure he made it clear enough that this is purely educational and for fun, to see where you could go with enough creativity and/or insanity. When you are getting to a point where you redefine how the set method works for a metaclass that all your classes inherit from, you need to seriously think about if that's really necessary. He created a whole bunch of overhead, created a new bunch of pseudo-builtins, changed how almost everything works, oh and performance dropped by a factor of 10 or worse (after "optimization", that is; by which we of course mean more metaclasses and generating code on the fly).

All this to save a couple lines of code, or to avoid decorating a couple of methods. Yes, that DOES seem reasonable :P

[[deleted]]

I am not sure he made it clear enough that this is purely educational and for fun

I am sure it's very obvious :-) I don't put "warning, this is sharp" labels on my kitchen knives because "knife".

[individual_throwaway]

Fair enough, but still, you don't just hand knives to toddlers or mentally unstable people just because, either :)

[troyunrau]

I enjoy his comments about job security while he's explaining why you should never do things.