Montréal-Python 13 will take place at UQAM, on Monday 2010-04-26 in room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building. The SH building is located at 200 Sherbrooke west, Place-des-Arts metro station.

Here is our schedule for the evening:

  • 18h00: Opening
  • 18h20: Announcements
  • 18h30: Flash presentations
  • 19h00: Break
  • 19h20: Main presentation
  • 20h30: Discussions and refreshments at Benelux

Flash Presenters will be:

  • Hao Deng on Pointfree Functional Programming in Python
  • Pierre Thibault on ipython
  • Alexandre Bourget on WebUndo
  • Sébastien Pierre on a surprise topic
  • Yannick Gingras on the Montréal-Python wiki

Our main presenter is going to be Andrew Francis and he’s going to talk about Implementing Go's select in Stackless Python.

Google's introduction of the Go language raised eyebrows in the Stackless Python community. Although very different languages, Go and Stackless Python's concurrency model share a common ancestor: the Bell Labs family of languages (i.e., Newsqueak, Limbo). The common feature are channels: a synchronous message passing mechanism based on Tony Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).
Both Go and Python have channels. However with the select language statement. Go has the ability to wait on multiple channels simultaneously. Stackless Python does not have this feature.
This talk discusses implementing a Select like feature in Stackless Python. The technique will be to prototype the feature with stackless.py - the PyPy's project implementation of Stackless Python written in Python!
Along the way, audience will learn Stackless Python basics and get a glimpse at greenlets and PyPy. In the process, the audience will see how Stackless Python's API reflects philosophical differences between Go and Stackless Python's approach to concurrency.
Living in Montréal, Andrew Francis has an academic background in the humanities, computer science, and management. Professionally, Andrew has worked at companies such as BNR, Omnimark, and Adobe Systems in California. Ever since 2005, Andrew has been playing with Stackless Python, as a part of his work with WS-BPEL, and he has never looked back! At Pycon 2008, Andrew gave the talk “Adventures in Stackless Python/Twisted Integration.”

We still have a few spots for flash presentations so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have something that you would like to present.

Thanks to our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 13 possible: