#280: Easy terminal scripts by sourcing your Py

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Special guest: Pat Decker

Michael #0: New live stream / recording time: 12pm US PT on Tuesdays. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified and be part of the episodes.

Brian #1: BTW, don’t make a public repo private

• How we lost 54k GitHub stars
  • Jakub Roztočil
  • HTTPie kinda sorta accidentally flipped their main repo to private for a sec.
  • And dropped the star count from 54k to 0
  • oops
  • They’re back up to 16k, as of today. But ouch.
• “HTTPie is a command-line HTTP client. Its goal is to make CLI interaction with web services as human-friendly as possible. HTTPie is designed for testing, debugging, and generally interacting with APIs & HTTP servers. The http & https commands allow for creating and sending arbitrary HTTP requests. They use simple and natural syntax and provide formatted and colorized output.”
• Actually, pretty cool tool to use for developing and testing APIs.

Michael #2: The counter-intuitive rise of Python in scientific computing

• via Galen Swint
• In our laboratory, a polarizing debate rages since around 2010, summarized by this question: Why are more and more time-critical scientific computations formerly performed in Fortran now written in Python, a slower language?
• Python has the reputation of being slow, i.e. significantly slower than compiled languages such as Fortran, C or Rust.
• So yes, plain Python is much slower than Fortran.
• However, this comparison makes little sense, as scientific uses of Python do not rely on plain Python.
• Used the right way, Python is slightly slower than compiled code.

Pat #3:

• Meta donates $300,000 to PSF to add a second year for the Developer in Residence

Brian #4: Dashboards in Python

• Two suggestions from Marc Skov Madsen
• The Easiest Way to Create an Interactive Dashboard in Python
  • Sophia Yang & Mark Skov Madsen
  • Includes
    • animated gif showing the dashboard
    • video of Sophia walking through the article in under 6 minutes
  • “Turn Pandas pipelines into a dashboard using hvPlot .interactive"
  • hvPlot is part of HoloViz and this example is pretty short and amazing to get a great dashboard with controls up very quickly.
• Python Dashboarding Shootout and Showdown | PyData Global 2021
  • 5 speakers, 4 dashboard libraries, nice for comparison.
  • Nice clickable index posted by Duy Nguyen
    • 00:00 - Begin and Welcome
    • 03:15 - Intro to the 4 Dashboarding libraries
    • 07:04 - Plotly - Nicolas Kruchten
    • 22:01 - Panel - Marc Skov Madsen
    • 37:38 - voila - Sylvain Corlay
    • 51:36 - Streamlit - Adrien Treuille
    • 01:10:52 - Discussion Topics

Michael #5: sourcepy

• by Dave Chevell
• Sourcepy lets you source python scripts natively inside your shell
• Imagine a Python script with functions in it. This converts those to CLI commands (kind of like entrypoints, but simpler)
• Type hints can be used to coerce input values into their corresponding types.
• standard IO type hints can be used to target stdin at different arguments and to receive the sys.stdin
• Sourcepy has full support for asyncio syntax

Pat #6: Xonsh

• Xonsh Shell Combines the Best of Bash Shell and Python in Linux Terminal
• Awesome demo video (50 min) https://youtu.be/x85LSyCxiw8

Extras

Pat:

• Donate to the PSF by using https://rewards.microsoft.com

Joke: Can you really quit vim?

Joke: Forgetting how to count