#143 Spike the robot, powered by Python!

Python Bytes - A podcast by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken - Mondays

Podcast artwork

Categories:

Technology

Special guest: Kelly Schuster-Paredes

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean

Brian #1: Keynote: Python 2020 - Łukasz Langa - PyLondinium19

  • Enabling Python on new platforms is important.
  • Python needs to expand further than just CPython.
    • Web, 3D games, system orchestration, mobile, all have other languages that are more used. Perhaps it’s because the full Python language, like CPython in full is more than is needed, and a limited language is necessary.
  • MicroPython and CircuitPython are successful.
    • They are limited implementations of Python
  • Łukasz talks about many parts of Python that could probably be trimmed to make targeted platforms very usable without losing too much.
  • It’d be great if more projects tried to implement Python versions for other platforms, even if the Python implementation is limited.

Kelly #2: Mu Editor

  • by Nicholas Tollervey
  • Lots of updates happening to the Code with Mu software
  • Mu is a Python code editor for beginner programmers
  • Code with Mu presented at EuroPython and shared a lot of interesting updates and things in the alpha version of Mu, available on code with Mu website.
  • Mu is a modal editor:
    • BBC Microbit
    • Circuit Python
    • ESP Micropython
    • Pygame Zero
    • Python 3
      • Tiago Monte’s recorded presentation at EuroPython
      • Game with Turtle
    • Flask — release notes
  • Made with Mu at EuroPython videos
  • Hot off the press: Nick just released Pypercard a HyperCard inspired GUI framework for BEGINNER developers in Python based off of Adafruit’s release.
    • It is a “PyperCard is a HyperCard inspired Pythonic and deliberately constrained GUI framework for beginner programmers.
    • linked repos on GitHub.
    • module re-uses the JSON specification used to create HyperCard
    • The concept allows user to “create Hypercard like stacks of states” to allow beginner coders to create choose their own adventure games.

Michael #3: Understanding the Python Traceback

  • by Chad Hansen
  • The Python traceback has a wealth of information that can help you diagnose and fix the reason for the exception being raised in your code.
  • What do we learn right away?
    • The type of error
    • A description of the error (hopefully, sometimes)
    • The line of code the error occurred on
    • The call stack (filenames, line numbers, and module names)
    • If the error happened while handling another error
  • Read from bottom to top — that was weird to me
  • Most common error? AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'an_attribute'
  • Article talks about other common errors
  • Are you creating custom exceptions to make your packages more useful?

Brian #4: My oh my, flake8-mypy and pytest-mypy

  • contributed by Ray Cote via email
  • “For some reason, I continually have problems running mypy, getting it to look at the correct paths, etc. However, when I run it from flake8-mypy, I'm getting reasonable, actionable output that is helping me slowly type hint my code (and shake out a few bugs in the process). There's also a pytest-mypy, which I've not yet tried. “ - Ray
  • flake8-mypy **
    • Maintained by Łukasz Langa
    • “The idea is to enable limited type checking as a linter inside editors and other tools that already support Flake8 warning syntax and config.”
  • pytest-mypy
    • Maintained by Dan Bader and David Tucker
    • “Runs the mypy static type checker on your source files as part of your pytest test runs.”
      • Remind me to do a PR against the README to make pytest lowercase.

Kelly #5: Lego Education and Spike

  • In March of this year, Lego Education gave news of a new robot being released since the EV3 released of Mindstorms in 2013.
    • Currently the EV3 Mindstorm can be coded with Python and it is assumed that Spike Prime can be as well.
  • The current EV3 robots can currently be coded in python thanks to Nigel Ward. He created a site back in 2016 or earlier; through a program called the EV3Dev project.
  • Until recently, Lego had not endorsed the use of Python or had they released documentation.
    • Lego released a Getting started with EV3 MicroPython 59 page guide Version 1.0.0
    • EV3 MicroPython runs on top of ev3dev with a new Pybricks MicroPython runtime and library.
    • has its own Visual Studio Code extension
    • no need for terminal
    • Has instruction and lists of different features and classes used to program the PyBricks API- A python wrapper for the Databricks Rest API.
  • This opens up opportunities for students that compete in the First Lego League Competition to code in Python.
  • Example code for the Gyrobot

Michael #6: Python 3 at Mozilla

  • From January 2019.
  • Mozilla uses a lot of Python.
  • In mozilla-central there are over 3500 Python files (excluding third party files), comprising roughly 230k lines of code.
  • Additionally there are 462 repositories labelled with Python in the Mozilla org on Github
  • That’s a lot of Python, and most of it is Python 2.
  • But before tackling those questions, I want to address another one that often comes up right off the bat: Do we need to be 100% migrated by Python 2’s EOL?
  • No. But punting the migration into the indefinite future would be a big mistake:
    • Python 2 will no longer receive security fixes.
    • All of the third party packages we rely on (and there are a lot of them) will also stop being supported
    • Delaying means more code to migrate
    • Opportunity cost: Python 3 was first released in 2008 and in that time there have been a huge number of features and improvements that are not available in Python 2.
  • The best time to get serious about migrating to Python 3 was five years ago. The second best time is now.
  • Moving to Python 3
  • We stood up some linters.
    • One linter that makes sure Python files can at least get imported in Python 3 without failing
    • One that makes sure Python 2 files use appropriate __future__ statements to make migrating that file slightly easier in the future.
  • Pipenv & poetry & Jetty: a little experiment I’ve been building. It is a very thin wrapper around Poetry

Extras

Brian:

  • Python 3.8.0b3
    • “We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.8 during the beta phase and report issues …”

Michael:

Kelly:

Jokes

  • via Real Python and Nick Spirit
  • Python private method → Joke cartoon image.