Python User Group Meeting, 21 March 2007
I haven't been going to any of the local user groups in a long time. The Denver Area Lisp UG seems to be moribund, which is too bad, but I've been meaning to go to the local Python and Ruby UGs, which both happened to be meeting last night in Boulder. It was a tough decision, but I opted for the Python UG based on the promised talk about XRC and wxPython. I have some personal experience with wxPython and I remember looking into XRC and not finding enough documentation. Matt Boersma gave a nice intro to XRC and made the topic much more approachable. XRC appears to be much simpler than manually building GUIs. I have the general feeling that desktop apps are a bit of an anachronism these days, but I definitely want to have another look at XRC, in any case.
Sean Reifschneider gave the second talk on building Python support for vim. He was speaking to a mostly Emacs crowd, so not exactly his target audience, but the group received he talk well. As it happens, the creator of iPython was in attendance and had a few questions on building vim support for iPython. After the meeting, he demo'd the existing Emacs support for iPython, which was quite impressive. I tend to like a minimalist configuration, as opposed to loading yet another package, so I'd rather investigate support for pdb, though my early research on that isn't very promising. It's funny to be around the Python Emacs users. When I saw Bill Clementson demo SLIME for the Denver Lisp Group, Bill's comment was "the best part about using Emacs is that the macro language is Lisp!". Last night, Sean demo'd a way to script vim using Python, saying "the best part is that it's not Lisp!"... and one of the Emacs users chimed in about a package that lets you script Emacs in Python. It's like visiting an alternate reality.
The Front Range Pythoneers seem to be a vibrant, active group, while still small enough to make for interesting presentations and side conversations. It's very nice to spend time with people who work with dynamic languages full- or nearly full-time.