
PyCon 2011: Interview with Zed Shaw - jnoller
http://pycon.blogspot.com/2011/02/title-pycon-2011-interview-with-zed.html
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zedshaw
At the moment I've got 13 students signed up for my class and the "newbie tour
of PyCon" I want to do. There's also about 6 Python experts (many much more
expert than myself) who are going to help with the class and the guiding
during the conference. That's a pretty good student/teacher ratio of about 2/1
assuming everyone who volunteered to help actually does.

Should be a blast, but if you guys have friends who you think would benefit
from this please tell them about it. They don't have to go to the tutorials to
join the group either. They can just show up like normal and hang out with us.

Thanks.

~~~
callahad
I had an absolutely wonderful time teaching Python to a few high school kids
last summer. Do you need any more folks on hand to help out?

~~~
zedshaw
Sure, the more the merrier, and I figure if you can bring a victim or two
that'd be good as well.

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rudiger
Mr. Shaw giving an "extreme talk" on using ZeroMQ, _Advanced Network
Architectures With ZeroMQ_ , should be interesting. For those that don't know
ZeroMQ and why it's so useful, here's a few links:

<http://nichol.as/zeromq-an-introduction>

<http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/09/introduction-zero-mq>

[http://www.igvita.com/2010/09/03/zeromq-modern-fast-
networki...](http://www.igvita.com/2010/09/03/zeromq-modern-fast-networking-
stack/)

[http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-640005....](http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-640005.2)
<== The Mongrel2 manual is probably the best concise introduction to ZeroMQ.

~~~
euroclydon
I was pushing for ZeroMQ as an alternative to WCF at my company, because we
will eventually need to integrate components not only written in C#, but C++
and Python too.

I encountered resistance because of WCF handles not only the serialization,
but the method routing on both ends of a service (by means of a proxy class,
which would be hard to set up in C++/Python anyhow). My reading on ZeroMQ
leads me to believe I could set up one socket as a front end which routes
message to a different publisher dedicated to each method?

Is this a good way to do it?

~~~
simonw
Just out of interest, if you're going to need to talk between C#, C++ and
Python, why not just use HTTP and JSON? Unless you have truly crazy
performance requirements that should be more than fast enough for most
purposes, and it's really easy to work with (debug in the browser etc).

~~~
mey
HTTP is designed for a single request, single response in order. ZeroMQ
messages can be sent without waiting for each messages response, thus a single
socket connection can push drastically more information then a single http
connection (not that you are limited to a single http connection). Connection
Pooling HTTP starts bringing in a lot of overhead, but doesn't provide some of
the other features ZeroMQ does (multi-honed etc) without some additional
effort (load balancers on the network).

I've personally been pondering a variation of JSON-RPC that operates over a
TCP socket not over the HTTP layer.

------
runjake
The article sounds to me, like Zed is saying Python's usefulness to him is
mainly as an educational language, not so much a "daily" language. Is this
right?

~~~
zedshaw
I use Python at work, and since I do I tend to not use it at home on my
personal projects. That makes sure there's no conflict of interest with my
employer. It also keeps me sane so that I don't get into a rut with my ideas.

These days I'm going with C and Lua. For example, I'm starting this project:

<http://edifying.tv/>

For fun with Lua and wxWidgets, and my latest websites are all Mongrel2 and
Lua based with:

<http://tir.mongrel2.org/>

But, for teaching total beginners to programming I'm finding Python is the
best so far.

~~~
108
LPTHW is a good goal for beginners but what about the intermediate ones? I
know how to code but when I see mongrel2 or any other opensource code I have
no clue how to start integrating them. There may be others like me so when are
you planning to write a not-so-advanced-book/tutorial for the intermediate
coder who can recognize a pointer from his function.

