PyCon 2010: Saturday Session 1 (morning)

For the morning session, I went to “Decorators From Basics to Class Decorators to Decorator Libraries” and “Interfaces, Adapters and Factories”, which were in the first and second sections. I skipped all the middle talks as I just didn’t see anything that I thought sounded interesting. Unfortunately, Open Space was almost completely under-utilized during the morning and afternoon, so there wasn’t really anything to do. Anyway, on to my thoughts about the two talks I dd get to see.

Charles Merriam did the Decorators talk. He covered it pretty well in depth. I still don’t know when to use decorators and when not to, so I’m beginning to think I’m pretty dense when it comes to this topic. Anyway, he covered the differences between Concrete Decorators and normal ones (which was Concrete had braces and the other did not). He also wrote a module called dectools that is supposed to make decorators easier to use. He also talked about class decorators and some of their uses, such as dictionary transmogrifying, callback registration, contract programming, non-inheritance mix-ins, and other weird stuff I’m not familiar with. Anyway, it was a good talk because it will hopefully make me look up all these new terms.

The Interfaces talk was done by the venerable Jeff Rush. This talk was a little over my head as well, but Mr. Rush always covers his subject(s) in depth and they’re always good. He went pretty deeply into interfaces, adapters and factories. I would definitely suggest that you download his slides (see link) and look for the video version when it gets posted.