Chris Curvey has been running the Boston Python Interest Group for a few years now and done a fantastic job. Work and other commitments will be keeping him from keeping this up, and for a while now he has been asking for someone else to step forward. No one person can manage everything, and a number of people have stepped forward to help out. Sally Kleinfieldt of the The Nature Conservatory will continue to host the semi-monthly formal presentations. I will deal with announcements and scheduling. Will Guaraldi offered to pay for a year of meetup.com, but we will try to get some corporate sponsorship first.

This evening was the second informal meet up of the year, held at Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street. In total there were five of us, which is about average for informal sessions rescheduled with one day notice (oops). This allowed for some intense discussion with a fair amount of depth, on a wide range of topics. I originally planned a seed discussion on a number of open source projects which are in need of more volunteer (and paid) support. We were so busy talking about education, engineering, Python 3000, and the differences between object and functional programming that we never really got to any projects besides OLPC; which is good as I left the materials on the printer at work. I love informal gatherings like this because it allows for some amazing free association and everyone comes away learning something. Hearing how others are using python and other technologies to solve real world problems or just for fun; it never gets old. Here are the highlights (as much as I can remember………)

I wish I had the foresight to get peoples names written down, but that did not happen. Fahri Basegmez is starting a new company around a wxPython application. The concept to be able to model physical objects in 2D, animate them, and have them interact using a complex physics engine. The catch? It’s targeted for high school students and has a clean GUI+Python Editor. The current plan is to have a demonstration of the application for the June 14th Boston-Pig formal meeting at the Nature Conservatory. I am being light on details on purpose as I do not know how much the author wants to disclose at this date. More detail will be given when we get closer to the June meeting.

There was a lengthy discussion about ‘Software Engineering’ and the issues on whether any software can be held to the same engineering principles of quality, verification and standardization of classical Engineering disciplines. I personally like to think of myself as an ‘Engineer’, but I know I am not. My undergrad with in Electrical Engineering, but I am not certified, and have been principally a programmer since age 11 (I have the uncashed $6.20 royalty check to prove it). I think the end consensus can be summed up as: Certain aspects of software design and algorithms can be held to the rigors of an engineering discipline, but on a whole software is closer to literature than engineering.

The benefits of FORTRAN for fast mathematical processing and how to access those entrypoints from python ctypes was discussed in some detail. Other languages including lisp, PLG, PLA, CPM, hascal, smalltalk, C#, VB, Mono, and assembly were discussed, dissected, and all around ripped upon and praised in equal amounts. At some point we got to talking about IronPython. At PyCon Fuzzyman gave a demo of using the gui builder in DevStudio with IronPython instead of VB. There was also a demo of something similar for wxPython, but overall it was weak by comparison. No one knew of anything better which was not tied to the Windows operating system.

One question came up on trying to validate if a piece of python code is malicious or not. This included all the standard issues with restricted python. Some of the standard tools were mentioned as well as Tim Peters opinions on the matter. A fair amount of time was spent contrasting a pier review community based system for validating code, verses an automated one, or some sort of hybrid.

Chuck Spitz has a new web service he would like people to look at and give feedback on. It is a consumer based car review site, zDecisions, based on the django framework. Go check it out, fill out the survey, and send him an e-mail with feedback on the site.

There were a number of web sites and projects mentioned which people were interested in or were proposed as solutions to peoples problems. Here are the ones I can remember:

In the end it was almost three hours of interesting discussions on not just python, but programming, engineering, and education; just to pick three topics. The next Boston-Pig meeting will once again be an informal meeting at the Trident Booksellers, Thursday May 10th, 7pm-9pm (or later).