[LUAU] Re: Python (Was Re: Hosef)

[Clifton Royston]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 02:00:18PM -1000, Tim Newsham wrote:
> > Would anyone be interested in starting up a very informal Hawaii
> >Python Users' Group?  Probably more of an occasional meet-up and chat,
> >but we could see what evolves from it.
> 
> Ok, so lots of people are interested.  What's the next step?
> 
> It would be good to come together sometime and I guess talk shop.
> Obviously it would be better if we could do it somewhere where people
> had computers and the internet.  I'm not sure where that would be.
> Perhaps the hosef lab space would be usable?  Scott?
> 
> So... when and where?  With the holidays coming up I'm sure people's 
> schedules are hectic, but I imagine most interested people could make a 
> saturday morning/afternoon time at some point in the next few weeks?

  Something like this is what I was thinking, yeah.

  I am packing tonight to head for LA tomorrow, for Thanksgiving with
my wife's family, hence I will give it essentially no thought until I
get back.  I'm sure many others are in a similar state of Thanksgiving
prep, so I wasn't figuring anything much would get planned or scheduled
until after this weekend.
 
> Beyond that, what are people hoping to get out of this?  I'm sure
> different people will have different answers.  If we do all meet up,
> whats our agenda?  Are we going to talk advocacy?  Go over some
> tutorial type stuff?  Swap code and talk about it?  Talk about particular
> technologies that interact with python?
 
  My attitude has always been "useful code wins", as I'm not big on the
whole advocacy thing.  Hopefully we could also assume newbs like me
will do a little self-study of the language basics, so we can at least
skip the intro tutorials, but advanced tutorials would be cool.

> Also further into things.. how much room do people want to allow for
> other topics (rails, ruby, perl, lisp, etc...)
 
  I'm willing to present on perl if anybody's interested, though I tend
to think "everybody knows perl".

> My input:  A saturday afternoon such as Dec. 3rd, around 1pm or so
> for a few hours (2, maybe 3?) with an aim to teach and learn new stuff
> by exchanging code and reworking it for demonstration purposes and
> discussing it?  Geeky enough?

  A good goal, I think.  Where I think some meetings and swapping
real-world code can help all of us is in getting beyond the tutorial
stages of learning a language's basic syntactic features, and getting a
short-cut into learning the useful idioms and native style of a
language - picking up the

	for ( ; *s++ = *t++ ; ) 
		;
or the
 	@fields = split( /,\s*/ );

of a language, or for that matter a framework.

  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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