RocPy Meet-up - October edition

We once again set out on our way to RocPy. This time without our illustrious leader, DeCause. This meant that we had a new set of carpool leaders. The only annoying thing about the carpooling was that it had started to lightly downpour. I normally don't mind the rain, but is a little disheartening just standing around waiting in it. Regardless, we left for the University of Rochester right on time. The car I as riding in was full of complete strangers to me, so conversation was rather non-existent.

Once we got to U of R, we made the long trek up to the 4th floor corner that is the ever drab home of the meet-up. We had a surprising amount of people there, not counting the merry band that was coming from the FOSS classes. One thing that I am learning is that public speaking is not the forte of many of the organizers for the meetup, which is a little surprising as they seem to be teachers. This was most prevalent in the first portion where they were going over Python in the news.

Following that, we got a rather lengthy lecture on how to bridge Python into other languages. Despite that being the main premise of the lecture, the only thing that I really came away from it regarding bridging Python with other languages is that Python is a very slow language. The actual bridging was sort-of glossed over. It was almost like a cooking show, with all of the bridging done before hand and just showing off the results of the bridging on sample code. Ironically enough, certain examples didn't actually prove to be that much better, namely the Haskell implementation.

The thing that ended off the meeting was another of the organizers talking about His Raytracer which was being implemented in Python. What I found to be most interesting was the justification being used to use Python for the program despite being so slow. "It can be used as a teaching tool, because it is easier to read." I find that to be a remarkable sentiment. While it is true that Python can be made to look like almost psuedocode next to something like C++, a decent amount of that can be written off as the person writing the code in the first place. Programming languages are like tools, you use the tool best suited to the job, and Python is not that language for something like this thought experiment.

Overall,, RocPy was far more dull this month than it was last month. I hope that the November and December meet-ups are a little more lively.