Announcements

• distribute and setuptools have finally merged (see also: the announcement).
• The Atlanta chapter of PyLadies will be giving the presentations on their 1-year anniversary (or the closest night to their 1-year anniversary).
• J.R. is starting a Smyrna tech group.

One-liner fizz-buzz (Doug Hellmann)

• I’m excited; I don’t think I’ve ever seen Doug golfing code before.
• He starts by discussing somebody else’s golfed version; I has a sad.
• But here’s his solution. I dig it.

PANDAS: Python Data Analysis Library (Andy Henshaw)

• Interesting; why do a custom thing to drive PowerPoint from iPython. Isn’t that a pretty close parallel to iPython Notebook?
• First primitive: a Series
  • It’s an array-like that contains data and labels (or indices).
  • The data must be of the same type.
  • Asking for multiple labels gives you a view into the series; providing a single label gives you the value for that label.
  • Labels don’t have to be unique; if you have multiple values for a single label, then requesting that label’s value gives you a view, much like asking for multiple labels’ values.
  • Can accommodate incomplete data; labels without values represent the value as NaN.
  • NaN is used even for a Series of strings.
  • Data is automatically aligned (that’s pretty sweet).
• Second primitive: a Dataframe
  • It’s tabular data, a la a spreadsheet.
  • Easy to create one from a dict of equal-length lists.
  • Or you could pass a dict of dicts.
  • You can add new columns to existing Dataframes using either direct assignment or calculation.
  • You can re-index.
• Bring on the stats!
  • It’s smart about figuring out how to apply descriptive stats like sum to columns/rows.
• All sorts of useful import functionality for structured data, e.g., JSON, CSV, et al.
• OK, once he started talking about crosstabs, I was in the territory where I have a hard time keeping up during a talk.
• Plotting w/ matplotlib is just cool. I need to get better at this sort of stuff.
• TimeSeries sounds totally awesome.

[None]: True or False? (Cliff Kachinske)

• I wonder how you’d address this in a general way.
• The consensus in the room seems to be that any and all are the best way to go.

Creating Python Bindings for C++ using boost::python (Aleksey Vitebskiy)

• A dig at JNI? I like this guy already.
• C++ wrappers for the major Python objects
• Declarative-style API
• Man, C++ is so alien to me, now. It took me a while to really read a few of those lines.
• It allows extensive interop: you can extend Python classes, Python classes can extend C++ classes… pretty hardcore.
• It does full-on MRO stuff, so it fully supports multiple inheritance (color me impressed); no metaclasses, though :-(
• Haha! You don’t see duck-typing in conjunction with C++ all that often.
• This slide of pros and cons vs. SWIG is gold if you need this functionality.