[sf-lug] possible python talk in March

[jim stockford]

hiya, all:
There's the possibility that we could get a Python
(programming language) instructor to come hang
out for the evening of March 20 (third Monday of
the month, 6:00 PM till about 8:00 PM).

If nobody objects, I'll have her show up at the
Javacat on March 20.

Python's a modern language with a lot of support
in a lot of different directions:

----- Java-ite interests -------------

* http://www.python.org/workshops/1997-10/proceedings/savikko.html
Gang of Four patterns (singleton, etc.), should appeal
to java-ites.

* http://www.python.org/workshops/1997-10/proceedings/zukowski.html
MVC design, interesting "undo" discussion -- more
pattern stuff for java-ites.

* http://www.python.org/pypi/epydoc/2.1
a la javadoc, an API documentation tool.

* http://www.python.org/pypi/mpservlets/1.1.6
Mod_python servlet class handler.

----- Webby interests ----------------

* http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/12/
Quixote Toolkit for web work: http request, response,
session management...

* http://www.python.org/workshops/1995-12/papers/shprentz.html
creating HTML documents with Python, objects map to
html document structure.

* http://docs.python.org/lib/module-htmllib.html
parser for HTML 2.0

* http://docs.python.org/lib/module-webbrowser.html
module for html document.

----- General interests -------------------

* http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.5/lib/module-re.html
this is about regular expressions: the claim is that
python has similar capabilities to Perl, which should
be interesting to both perlies and sysadms.

* http://docs.python.org/modindex.html
module index shows rich XML support. I was surprised
at the amount of Macintosh ( Carbon.* ) support. There's
lots of system support (sockets, heap, file*, gzip, commands,
and more--impressive for sysadms), DOM, SAX, and SOAP
support....

* http://www.python.org/pypi?:action=index
Wow! A though Z never looked so good. wiki engines,
bitTorrent, cryptography, bicycle repair, Bruce the
presentation tool, IRC client, plenty of math, RSS
toolkit, SOAP toolkit, python-extensible SQL db engine,
blog server, application framework including CORBA
and error handling and GUI support, 3-D graphic engine,
support for various popular database engines, TeX
formatter, (my favorite: a Python to Assembler translator),
bluetooth support, grid networking support..., TONS
MORE, what a fun list.

* from the EETimes newsletter:
"Scripting language takes silicon turn--
If you want an easy way to design chips, says consultant
Jan Decaluwe, look no further than the Python scripting
language. Python can be turned into a hardware description
language (HDL) with the help of Decaluwe's open-source
tool suite, MyHDL.