#143 Spike the robot, powered by Python!
Python Bytes - Podcast tekijän mukaan Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken - Maanantaisin
Kategoriat:
Special guest: Kelly Schuster-Paredes
Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean
Brian #1: Keynote: Python 2020 - Łukasz Langa - PyLondinium19
- Enabling Python on new platforms is important.
- Python needs to expand further than just CPython.
- Web, 3D games, system orchestration, mobile, all have other languages that are more used. Perhaps it’s because the full Python language, like CPython in full is more than is needed, and a limited language is necessary.
- MicroPython and CircuitPython are successful.
- They are limited implementations of Python
- Łukasz talks about many parts of Python that could probably be trimmed to make targeted platforms very usable without losing too much.
- It’d be great if more projects tried to implement Python versions for other platforms, even if the Python implementation is limited.
Kelly #2: Mu Editor
- by Nicholas Tollervey
- Lots of updates happening to the Code with Mu software
- Mu is a Python code editor for beginner programmers
- originally created as a contribution from the Python Software Foundation for the BBC’s micro:bit project
- Code with Mu presented at EuroPython and shared a lot of interesting updates and things in the alpha version of Mu, available on code with Mu website.
- Mu is a modal editor:
- BBC Microbit
- Circuit Python
- ESP Micropython
- Pygame Zero
- Python 3
- Tiago Monte’s recorded presentation at EuroPython
- Game with Turtle
- Flask — release notes
- Made with Mu at EuroPython videos
- Hot off the press: Nick just released Pypercard a HyperCard inspired GUI framework for BEGINNER developers in Python based off of Adafruit’s release.
- It is a “PyperCard is a HyperCard inspired Pythonic and deliberately constrained GUI framework for beginner programmers.
- linked repos on GitHub.
- module re-uses the JSON specification used to create HyperCard
- The concept allows user to “create Hypercard like stacks of states” to allow beginner coders to create choose their own adventure games.
Michael #3: Understanding the Python Traceback
- by Chad Hansen
- The Python traceback has a wealth of information that can help you diagnose and fix the reason for the exception being raised in your code.
- What do we learn right away?
- The type of error
- A description of the error (hopefully, sometimes)
- The line of code the error occurred on
- The call stack (filenames, line numbers, and module names)
- If the error happened while handling another error
- Read from bottom to top — that was weird to me
- Most common error? AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'an_attribute'
- Article talks about other common errors
- Are you creating custom exceptions to make your packages more useful?
Brian #4: My oh my, flake8-mypy and pytest-mypy
- contributed by Ray Cote via email
- “For some reason, I continually have problems running mypy, getting it to look at the correct paths, etc. However, when I run it from flake8-mypy, I'm getting reasonable, actionable output that is helping me slowly type hint my code (and shake out a few bugs in the process). There's also a pytest-mypy, which I've not yet tried. “ - Ray
- flake8-mypy **
- Maintained by Łukasz Langa
- “The idea is to enable limited type checking as a linter inside editors and other tools that already support Flake8 warning syntax and config.”
- pytest-mypy
- Maintained by Dan Bader and David Tucker
- “Runs the mypy static type checker on your source files as part of your pytest test runs.”
- Remind me to do a PR against the README to make pytest lowercase.
Kelly #5: Lego Education and Spike
- In March of this year, Lego Education gave news of a new robot being released since the EV3 released of Mindstorms in 2013.
- Currently the EV3 Mindstorm can be coded with Python and it is assumed that Spike Prime can be as well.
- The current EV3 robots can currently be coded in python thanks to Nigel Ward. He created a site back in 2016 or earlier; through a program called the EV3Dev project.
- ev3dev is a Debian Linux-based operating system
- Until recently, Lego had not endorsed the use of Python or had they released documentation.
- Lego released a Getting started with EV3 MicroPython 59 page guide Version 1.0.0
- EV3 MicroPython runs on top of ev3dev with a new Pybricks MicroPython runtime and library.
- has its own Visual Studio Code extension
- no need for terminal
- Has instruction and lists of different features and classes used to program the PyBricks API- A python wrapper for the Databricks Rest API.
- Pybricks is on GitHub from one contributor, Sebastien Thomas under MIT license
- David Lechner, Laurens Valk, and Anton Vanhoucke are contributors of the Lego MicroPython release.
- This opens up opportunities for students that compete in the First Lego League Competition to code in Python.
- Example code for the Gyrobot
Michael #6: Python 3 at Mozilla
- From January 2019.
- Mozilla uses a lot of Python.
- In mozilla-central there are over 3500 Python files (excluding third party files), comprising roughly 230k lines of code.
- Additionally there are 462 repositories labelled with Python in the Mozilla org on Github
- That’s a lot of Python, and most of it is Python 2.
- But before tackling those questions, I want to address another one that often comes up right off the bat: Do we need to be 100% migrated by Python 2’s EOL?
- No. But punting the migration into the indefinite future would be a big mistake:
- Python 2 will no longer receive security fixes.
- All of the third party packages we rely on (and there are a lot of them) will also stop being supported
- Delaying means more code to migrate
- Opportunity cost: Python 3 was first released in 2008 and in that time there have been a huge number of features and improvements that are not available in Python 2.
- The best time to get serious about migrating to Python 3 was five years ago. The second best time is now.
- Moving to Python 3
- We stood up some linters.
- One linter that makes sure Python files can at least get imported in Python 3 without failing
- One that makes sure Python 2 files use appropriate
__future__
statements to make migrating that file slightly easier in the future.
- Pipenv & poetry & Jetty: a little experiment I’ve been building. It is a very thin wrapper around Poetry
Extras
Brian:
- Python 3.8.0b3
- “We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.8 during the beta phase and report issues …”
Michael:
- pipx now has shell completions
Kelly:
- Teaching Python podcast
Jokes
- via Real Python and Nick Spirit
- Python private method → Joke cartoon image.