I’ve just returned from Birmingham where EuroPython, the European Python conference, has been held for the second time in successive years. The organizers have done a tremendous job to make it a friendly and productive conference. I attended the preceding tutorial days, taking a full-day tutorial on py.test by Holger Krekel, a half-day introduction to Google App Engine by the venerable Wesley Chun, author of Core Python, and a half-day tutorial about TextTest held by Geoffrey Bache. All of them were excellent.

During the main conference which lasted from Monday through Thursday I focused on presentations relating to code quality and performance. Highlights for me were Raymond Hettinger’s Idiomatic Python who was given another free time slot to cover more material, and the talks about virtual machines (PyPy, HotPy). Guido van Rossum, Python’s “Benevolent Dictator for Lifetime”, gave a very insightful questions-and-answers keynote session, where he addressed many issues both interesting and relevant for Python’s future. Concerning one of them, which is also very close to my own heart, he mentioned that he is interested in high-level concurrency constructs and is attending all CSP-related talks in the conference (e.g. [1], [2]). There was also a CSP-related sprint in the days following the conference. I think this is a very important field, and has to be covered in good manner in Python. One other thing that struck me was the way people twist and bent Python, using its meta programming facilities, as e.g. Kay Schlühr demonstrated with Langscape, a framework to define language extensions which get translated to standard Python. There were also two lightning talks sessions which were a very good way of presenting interesting topics to a large audience in a few minutes.

During the conference there was also the first meeting of the PSF ever to be held outside the US. The PSF, the Python Software Foundation, is the non-profit legal entity behind Python that holds the intellectual property rights and tries to promote and protect the language. Twenty non-members where invited to attend and I managed to slip in. It was an interesting insight into the inner workings of an international open-source organisation. All in all it was a very interesting and enjoyable conference, with lots of contacts and chats during breaks and in the after-conference evenings. Way to go, EuroPython! (Ah, I wish they would rename it into PyCon Europe).