froscon2008 - 1.1

FrOSCon
Free and Open Source Software Conference

Speakers
Dirk Hünniger
Schedule
Day Day 2 (2008-08-24)
Room Workshop
Start time 10:00
Duration 02:30
Info
ID 295
Event type workshop
Track Development
Language used for presentation en
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Python coffee/tea party

An introduction to Python

We will have some coffee and tea and chat about the Python programming language. There will be a few experienced Python users with their laptops around to give you a basic introduction to the language, but also to answer your sophisticated questions. The course is open to people without any previous knowledge of programming, but it is also interesting for experienced developers who want find out if Python offers better solutions to the problems they face in their day to day work.

Python is modern object oriented programming language. It is licensed under a weak copyleft, so it suits for commercial as well as open source projects. Python is an object oriented language that uses bytecode-compilation and has got a garbage collector. In this respect it is similar to Java. But the type system is much different, the type of an object is not known at compiletime, although it is known at runtime. This is similar to some scripting languages, although Python, unlike a scripting language, is successfully used to write large scale projects. Python does not enforce curly brackets to mark the beginning and end of environments in the code, like C, Java do. Everything is done by indentation, a similar mechanism as the one used in Haskell. Although Python is object oriented as well as imperative, in contrast to Haskel, there are some functional Programming tool included like some lambda, as well as list comprehensions. So I hope you became interested to see what Python is all about, and I am looking forward to meet you on the Python coffee/tea party.