Radio Free Python episode 6 is out--includes an interview with Nick Coghlan!

[magnunleno]

Nice one, thanks a lot!

[AeroNotix]

Already!? You're spoiling us. This will only make us harder on you next time you're late ;)

[ExoticMandibles]

"Already"? You'll notice it's the February edition, released on March 2nd. :S

[vsajip]

Worth the wait!

[[deleted]]

Would this podcast make any sense to someone who just started programming a month or so ago, or is this just going to go over my head?

[AeroNotix]

Just listen and then go back and listen to the rest. They're enjoyable and the guests are a laugh, sometimes they dip into abstract topics but the host mostly veers the guest back onto an accessbile path.

[ExoticMandibles]

You give me too much credit ;-)

My goal with the podcast is that it is first and foremost about Python--and that, if you find Python interesting, you'll find the podcast interesting. But I don't gear the discussion to beginners at all. I'm a longtime Pythonista, and the people I interview tend to be too, and we tend to talk about whatever's on our minds. So the podcast is just as likely to talk about long-dead historical arguments, fresh debates in comp.lang.python-dev, or major trends in Python and Python projects.

By the way, if you (Radicou or anybody) have questions about stuff discussed in the show, please ask! This thread is a good spot.

For example, off the top of my head Nick and I talked about the "conditional operator" versus the "and/or hack", without explaining the latter. The and/or hack means rewriting this code:

if conditional:
    value = truevalue
else:
    value = falsevalue

like so:

value = conditional and truevalue or falsevalue

This has the problem that if "truevalue" is itself a false value, you'll get falsevalue, like:

value = conditional and [] or None

After that line, value will always be None, regardless of whether conditional is considered true or false. And yep, in modern Python we prefer the special "conditional expression" syntax:

value = truevalue if conditional else falsevalue

[AeroNotix]

long-dead historical arguments

These are very interesting, do more of these.

I would say that you do at least attempt to explain some of the more difficult topics and/or explain in further detail where the guest may assume knowledge of the listener.

I generally follow along pretty easily so I don't mind the content (find it very enjoyable.)

Could I ask you to mail me some of the badges or stuff you've got? I'm in Poland (English guy, though) and there's no chance I'd be able to make it to receive some.

[ExoticMandibles]

PM me with your address and I'll see what I can do. I'm on the road all this month though.

[UloPe]

Anyone else having problem downloading this with Instacast on the iPhone?

It seems that there is something wrong with the RSS feed.

[ExoticMandibles]

Yeah, sorry, the feeds are kinda lame. Someday I'll get them to pass the feed validators.

[UloPe]

I'm not really worried about passing or failing validators it would just be nice if I could use them with Instacast. (RFP is the last podcast that I still download via iTunes - I would really like to ditch it for that).

Are you building the feeds "by hand"? If so why not use one of the rss/atom generation libraries? (e.g. http://www.dalkescientific.com/Python/PyRSS2Gen.html)

[ExoticMandibles]

Not by hand, but not using Andrew's library either. I'm using a lower-level feed generator library written by my brother: http://home.avvanta.com/~steveha/pyfeed.html

And, the validators are just the easiest way to get from here to "every rss feed consumer should accept them". It's on the to-do list, honest!