#143: Spike the robot, powered by Python!

Published Wed, Aug 14, 2019, recorded Wed, Aug 7, 2019

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
- originally created as a contribution from the Python Software Foundation for the BBC’s micro:bit project
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.
- ev3dev is a Debian Linux-based operating system
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.
  - Pybricks is on GitHub from one contributor, Sebastien Thomas under MIT license
  - David Lechner, Laurens Valk, and Anton Vanhoucke are contributors of the Lego MicroPython release.
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