Transcript #91: Will there be a PyBlazor?

00:00 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds.

00:04 It's episode 91, recorded August 8th, 2018. I'm Michael Kennedy.

00:09 And I'm Brian Ockin.

00:10 Hey, Brian. How are you doing?

00:11 I'm doing great.

00:12 Awesome. Well, as always, the Python news cycle has not let us down, has it?

00:16 No, it's keeping up. It's good.

00:19 It's definitely. We've got a lot of good stuff to cover.

00:21 Before we do, though, another thing not letting us down is Datadog.

00:24 They're definitely helping us prop up.

00:27 So thank you, Datadog, for sponsoring this episode.

00:29 Check them out at pythonbytes.fm.datadog.

00:31 They actually have some cool new announcements, which I'll get to later.

00:33 But let's talk about what makes Python cool, huh?

00:36 There's a lot of stuff that makes Python cool.

00:38 But there was an article that came up.

00:41 I think it's on Medium.

00:43 HackerNoon. That's right.

00:45 Sorry, HackerNoon, that I thought you were Medium for a second.

00:47 By Shankar Jha.

00:49 And I probably mispronounced his last name. Apologies.

00:52 But an article called What Makes Python Cool.

00:55 And my first reaction is like, oh, yet another rah-rah.

00:58 Python is awesome.

00:59 But it is actually kind of a neat article because it talks about some of the things that a lot of people that are just starting out or starting to learn Python or they have to might not stumble around.

01:11 They might not run into for a while.

01:13 And they're good things to note.

01:15 So he starts off with the Zen of Python with import this.

01:19 And it's a good thing for people to look at.

01:22 And then, of course, if you're looking at cool imports, import anti-gravity that redirects you to XKCD is cool.

01:29 Yeah, if people have never typed import anti-gravity in their REPL in Python, they should definitely do that.

01:35 And those two things actually make it – they're not just jokes.

01:39 It kind of indoctrinates you into the fact that the Python community doesn't take itself too awfully seriously.

01:46 It's all serious work and we do a lot of important things.

01:50 But it's a good, fun thing to have there.

01:52 So I hope they never take those out.

01:54 Yeah, I agree.

01:55 And then things that he starts off right off the bat after that with how to swap two variables in one line.

02:02 Like A, B equals B, A.

02:07 We're just used to that now.

02:08 But when you first see this – or a lot of people don't think they can do that because you can't do that in C, I don't think.

02:16 You didn't used to be able to at least.

02:18 Nope, I don't think so.

02:19 And it's a fun extra thing.

02:20 How fast you can spin up a web server just with one line.

02:24 A reminder to take a look at the collections and iter tools modules or packages because there are a whole bunch of good stuff in there.

02:32 Enumerate with the enumerate keyword is – or built in, whatever that is.

02:38 It's a really cool thing and it keeps people from keeping track of their own indices when they're going through lists.

02:45 Do you know what I learned from Bob Beldervos from PyBytes with an I, not a Y, not Python bytes, about enumerate?

02:51 Is it takes an extra parameter that will let the index start at one or anything you specify.

02:56 Because I've always had like it go at zero, then I'll have like index plus one all over the place.

03:00 Well, you can just say start at one, two, three.

03:02 That's a parameter in there.

03:03 It's nice.

03:03 Yeah, and that's a brilliant thing because, yeah, I've seen that a lot of people adding one.

03:08 Just start at one and then it's in the right order.

03:11 Easily reverse a list, doing zip, a couple zip tricks, how cool comprehensions and dictionaries are, and pretty print with pprint.

03:20 Anyway, it's a good article.

03:22 Yeah, absolutely.

03:22 I really – I think it covers a lot of nice stuff.

03:24 And if you're kind of new to Python, there are some cool things in here that you'll be like,

03:29 oh, I didn't know when I was working in the REPL that if I forgot to assign some computation to a variable,

03:35 I can still access it one time quickly as an underscore.

03:39 So that's pretty cool.

03:40 Yeah, I actually forget that all the time.

03:42 So I'm glad that people keep putting that down because I forget about it and it saves time.

03:47 The many uses and meanings of underscore.

03:49 Yeah, and we're not even in Perl.

03:52 Yeah, exactly.

03:53 So if I were a Django person, I'm not.

03:57 My sites are based on Pyramid and Flask and things like that.

04:01 But if I were a Django person, I'd be doing a bit of a backflip right now because there's a brand new major Django release.

04:07 And this is the first major release after Django kicked Legacy Python out the door.

04:12 So Django 2.1 is out.

04:13 Pretty cool, huh?

04:14 Yeah.

04:14 What do we got in 2.1?

04:16 Well, there's actually a ton of features.

04:17 I think the one that the team highlights the most is this thing called model view permissions.

04:22 So Django comes with its ORM, right?

04:24 Its own ORM.

04:26 And in there, you have models that map to the database.

04:29 And now you can set it up so you have view-only permissions on models, which is pretty cool.

04:35 And they said Django 2 has reached the end of mainstream support.

04:39 They just released 2.0.8, which is the final version you're ever going to see except for possible security fixes until April of 2019.

04:47 But after that, there's going to be no more Django 2.0.

04:49 So be sure to look about upgrading.

04:51 And then in terms of features, we have the model view feature.

04:54 We also have the ability to customize how deletes happen.

04:59 So there's like a delete query set option.

05:01 So you can delete select objects and customize that.

05:04 There's a way to override the default admin site.

05:06 There's tons of ORM features.

05:08 I highlighted one, but there's actually a whole bunch.

05:09 Caching is pretty cool.

05:12 So caching used to kind of like store items.

05:15 And when it got full, it would just randomly start throwing stuff out.

05:17 And now it uses LRU, last recently used to call.

05:21 So like a better sort of the hot stuff stays in the cache, which is good.

05:24 Migrations can now be run from PYC, so compiled files.

05:29 So in frozen environments that are just have the binary bytecode, you can still run migrations and tons more.

05:34 Wow, that's actually pretty cool.

05:35 Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there.

05:37 Like there's pages and pages of changes from Django 2, which is pretty awesome.

05:41 Yeah, actually, if I was going to go look at Django, which is on my to-do list, the ability to overwrite the default admin site, that sounds kind of neat.

05:49 Because I'm not really a fan of the look of the default admin site.

05:54 Yeah, it's pretty cool.

05:55 Great.

05:55 So you've got one that's a little playful, right?

05:58 Yeah.

05:59 So this is actually pretty awesome.

06:02 It's actually a GitHub repo.

06:04 And I'm going to look this person up.

06:07 It's Annalena Popkis, which actually I might have actually got that last name right.

06:12 Who knows?

06:12 But she's a computer science graduate student or computer science graduate.

06:19 She's working as an intern right now, according to her blog.

06:22 But it's like the whole 100 days of code thing.

06:25 But she's doing it all in the open and all in Harry Potter themes.

06:31 And it's really fun.

06:33 And so far, it's up to day 18.

06:37 So she's still working on it.

06:39 And hopefully, we'll continue it all with it.

06:42 But this is just some really fun stuff.

06:44 And I like the idea of using a theme for going through a 100 days of code system.

06:50 So it's kind of fun.

06:51 Yeah.

06:52 So to give people an idea of what you're describing and what she's doing is like, for example, on

06:57 days 16, 17, 18, she worked with data classes.

07:00 Data classes are a cool 3-7 thing that are awesome.

07:02 And she's modeling a house, right?

07:05 When the young wizard students go off to the wizard school, they go into like Gryffindor

07:11 and Slytherin and the different houses.

07:12 And so like her whole example of exploring data classes is about that.

07:16 What also I think is actually going to pay off pretty big time for her is every one of these,

07:21 she's not just writing the code and putting it in a separate section in GitHub.

07:25 But she's also doing like a full-on explanatory blog post.

07:29 Like this one is probably six pages of writing about it.

07:33 And that's got to help understand it really well and make it stick.

07:35 Yeah.

07:36 And then it's also, you know, 100 days of writing, you know, practice writing about text stuff.

07:41 So yeah, it'll definitely help.

07:43 It's a good idea.

07:44 Yeah.

07:45 I love it.

07:45 I'm glad you brought that one in.

07:46 I saw that come up.

07:47 I'm like, wow, that's pretty clever.

07:49 Well done, Anna.

07:50 Nice.

07:50 All right.

07:51 Before we move on to the next one, let me tell you about a new feature from Datadog.

07:55 So we talked about Datadog and their monitoring and stuff before.

07:59 So Brian, we've talked a little bit about machine learning and AI taking over the world, right?

08:05 Yes.

08:06 Yeah.

08:07 So here's a little bit more of it in a good way.

08:09 So Datadog has their APM application performance monitoring stuff has a new watchdog auto detection engine that uses machine learning to alert you about performance anomalies in your application.

08:21 That's cool, right?

08:23 That is really cool.

08:24 So it learns how your app normally works.

08:25 It's like, whoa, you know, it's pinned this thing at 100% CPU for some reason.

08:29 Something must have gone wrong.

08:30 Or maybe it's totally flat.

08:32 You're processing no traffic.

08:34 Either way, you probably want to know.

08:35 So with Datadog's new watchdog thing, you can explore and analyze all your app performance data, navigate between correlated metrics, traces, logs, all that kind of stuff in real time.

08:45 So if you want to start optimizing your Python apps with machine learning, you can get a 14-day free trial and Datadog will send you a free t-shirt at pythonbytes.fm/Datadog.

08:55 So that's pretty awesome.

08:57 I'd like to check that out.

08:58 Yeah, definitely cool.

08:59 Yeah.

08:59 We've talked about deployment once or twice, right?

09:02 I think so.

09:03 Along with our GUI kick.

09:06 So here's an interesting take on it.

09:08 So one of the things I think is challenging about distributing a Python application is you have to distribute your source code.

09:15 Now, maybe you distribute the PYC files so you can distribute like a bytecode version, but it's pretty easy to unbytecode that, right?

09:23 But there's not a lot of great ways to distribute your code if you are concerned that maybe someone will mess with it.

09:29 Like you could put it onto, say, a web server, but if somebody breaks into the web server and they find your code, well, they could change simple things like your Stripe ID.

09:38 So all of a sudden, all your purchases start deposited into their bank account instead of yours or things like this, right?

09:44 So if you want to deploy your apps and protect them, that can be tricky.

09:48 And it's extra tricky in Python because if we're deploying C++ or Go or even .NET, there's like compiled binaries and you can sign those so that they don't get, they can't run basically if they're not properly signed and things like that.

10:01 But in Python, you distribute generally source code.

10:04 So this next thing is there's this like consulting group company and they wanted to come up with a way to protect Python code for the people they work for.

10:15 So they wrote this article and created this thing called Executing Encrypted Python with No Performance Penalty.

10:21 Oh, wow.

10:21 Cool.

10:22 So, you know, we have the PYC, which is the bytecode thing.

10:25 And that's just straight bytecode.

10:26 But what they've created is what they're calling a PYCE file.

10:30 And the PYCE file is an encrypted Python byte file, which until you decrypt it, can't be executed.

10:38 So that's pretty cool, right?

10:40 That's very cool.

10:41 Yeah, and the way they make this work is they override the import statement.

10:45 They basically import a library that changes what import means.

10:50 So when you say import, it runs their custom code that says, oh, it's one of these encrypted files.

10:55 Well, that means grab the decryption key, decrypt it.

10:58 Now we load that into memory.

10:59 And the no performance part comes from the fact that once Python has loaded a module, it's just in memory.

11:06 And so the decrypted version's in memory, you hit it again, and it's golden, right?

11:10 It just keeps running.

11:11 So basically, it maybe starts a tiny bit slower, but then it's the same.

11:15 So if this is something you're interested in, check it out.

11:18 It's pretty cool.

11:18 So is this a commercial thing or is it something there?

11:21 I think it's open source on GitHub as far as I can tell.

11:24 That's very cool.

11:26 It is from a commercial company, like a consulting company.

11:29 But I think, let me see if I can find the license.

11:32 Do they have a license?

11:33 The license is, wait for it.

11:36 Actually, wait for GitHub.

11:37 Come on, license.

11:38 Apache 2.0.

11:40 Yeah, permissive license.

11:42 Yeah, so it's free for commercial use.

11:44 This is a very cool thing.

11:46 I'll have to check that out.

11:47 Yeah, nice.

11:48 Yeah, it's not being used by a lot of people, but it seems to me like the people who want this really want this.

11:53 You know what I mean?

11:53 Everybody else is like, why do you want that?

11:55 I don't care about that.

11:56 But if you really wanted it, it seems like it'd be pretty cool.

11:58 So anyway, that's what I found for that one.

12:00 That's great.

12:00 Nice.

12:01 Yeah.

12:02 What's this next one about?

12:03 I don't even know what to make of your notes here.

12:06 This is crazy.

12:06 It's cool.

12:07 Well, actually, I just saw, this actually came in just this morning.

12:12 I saw a tweet from Harry Percival saying that he wrote a plug-in for pytest called pytest-ICDiff.

12:21 And it's a plug-in that allows you to use ICDiff for asserts that are equal comparisons in pytest.

12:31 Right, like a failure in, say, like, assert these are equal, but then they're not.

12:35 And it'll show you like a color diff instead of just, no, they're different.

12:39 Yeah, that's pretty much it.

12:40 I love it.

12:41 And I have never even heard of ICDiff, but ICDiff apparently is a different diff that isn't necessarily tied to pytest.

12:49 You can use it just on the command line for better diff, colored diffs.

12:54 Yeah, IC stands for improved color diff, which is pretty cool.

12:58 And it's a Python project in and of itself.

13:00 And then it looks like Harry Percival's pytest-ified it.

13:04 Yeah, it's cool that having some color there, highlight things.

13:08 I think it's great because so often when a test fails, you're like, oh, what is going on?

13:12 Like, you want to look at it and you're like, what is that?

13:15 Is that, oh, there's that dot there.

13:16 You know, like some color would really help, right?

13:18 Yeah, to highlight exactly which part of it's different.

13:21 Yeah, exactly.

13:21 So that's a pretty short section, just a new tool that I thought was neat.

13:25 I thought I'd share.

13:26 Well, I don't know why you wouldn't use this if you're using pytest.

13:29 Yeah, that won't help you for other types of asserts.

13:33 But it's the equality of why is it not equal that really trips people up sometimes.

13:38 Yeah, for sure.

13:39 Yeah, it's great.

13:40 Nice find there.

13:41 And well done, Harry.

13:42 All right, the last one is a bit of a amusing.

13:45 And this was sent to us by one of our listeners.

13:47 So thank you for sending this in.

13:50 And I wasn't sure whether we should cover it, but I kind of feel like we should.

13:53 So what they sent in to us is highlighting a .NET project, C#.NET.

14:00 And you might think, Michael, why do we care about a .NET project?

14:03 We don't really.

14:04 But the parallels for what we could do in Python, this would make me do a backflip.

14:09 I don't even know how to do it, but I'd give it a shot, even though it might hurt.

14:12 So they said, hey, there's this project called Blazor by the .NET guys.

14:17 And it was created by this guy by the name of Steve Sanderson, who's a really brilliant

14:20 web guy.

14:20 So what they're doing is they're using WebAssembly.

14:25 And if you're unfamiliar with that, it's a new, it's kind of like JavaScript, but in binary

14:31 compiled form.

14:32 So it's a binary instruction format for stack-based VM that runs inside of web browsers.

14:38 And it's designed as a portable target compilation for high-level languages like C, C++, and Rust.

14:45 So instead of writing in JavaScript and then running that in JavaScript engine, like V8

14:51 or whatever, you compile something like Rust or C++ or C into this WebAssembly stuff that

14:56 is then executed more or less natively in Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Chrome.

15:00 So all the browsers that really matter.

15:01 So coming back to this project, Blazor.

15:05 So what this is, is the .NET people and Steve Sanderson have found a way to take the entire

15:11 .NET runtime, known as the CLR, and compile it to WebAssembly.

15:16 And what's interesting about that is it's written entirely in C and C++.

15:22 You know what else is written entirely in C and C++?

15:24 Yeah, CPython.

15:26 CPython.

15:27 So what they've done is they've taken this thing, which is a native OS compiled thing,

15:32 and they've turned it into something that runs on the client side in the browser natively by

15:38 using WebAssembly.

15:38 That's cool.

15:39 That's awesome.

15:40 And it even has what's called a head-of-time compile mode.

15:43 So you can take your, in their case, .NET, my hope for the world Python code,

15:49 and pre-compile that into WebAssembly binaries that you ship instead of JavaScript or source code

15:54 or anything like that.

15:55 And they even created a single-page app front-end framework with routing and unit testing and

16:01 all sorts of stuff.

16:02 So this is a really cool project that I think may inspire people to try it for Python.

16:06 So what I still don't, I'm kind of, I hope people do try it for Python.

16:11 I think that'd be great.

16:12 I'm trying to, even Blazor itself, I'm trying to understand the use model.

16:16 Is it, it's not, at that point, you're not doing client-server stuff with Blazor, I'm assuming, or is it?

16:21 You could be doing client, so the real use of this is if you were thinking about using AngularJS,

16:28 VueJS, React, React Native, any of these, like, JavaScript front-end frameworks where most of your app

16:35 lives on the client side in the browser, like Gmail or Google Docs or Dropbox Paper or something like that.

16:41 Instead of writing that in tons of JavaScript and executing through a JavaScript engine, Blazor lets you write that in C# and execute it natively at a much higher performance.

16:51 Oh, okay.

16:52 Yeah.

16:52 So that's being accomplished by them.

16:54 And it's already, they have working models.

16:56 It's not like a theory.

16:57 This is already working.

16:59 So when we were at PyCon 2018 in Cleveland this year, one of the very first keynotes, a guy named Dan Callahan, I believe, may have misremembered his last name,

17:09 but worked for Mozilla.

17:10 And they basically laid this path out for Python and called for this to exist, said, look, there's WebAssembly, there's C code, CPython.

17:20 We need CPython in the browser.

17:23 Obviously, it can't do things like connect to databases or do other weird stuff that the browser won't allow.

17:28 But a vast majority of what you want to do in Python or JavaScript could be done in Python and faster and better.

17:34 Yeah.

17:35 Oh, that'd be cool.

17:36 Okay.

17:36 So that's really cool.

17:38 And I linked to his YouTube video that is the keynote where he lays this out.

17:42 It's like a 45-minute talk.

17:43 And the foundations of it, he actually references this in the video.

17:47 A lot of the foundations for WebAssembly itself come from this thing called ASM.js, A-S-M as in assembly, dot JS.

17:55 That's an interesting project that preceded it that will let you take, like, C code and run it in the browser by compiling it to JavaScript.

18:02 So Gary Bernhardt has this amazing fictional presentation that is very educational.

18:07 And the tech part it teaches is real, but it has, like, a story around it called The Birth and Death of JavaScript.

18:13 So that's the proper pronunciation in his fake world.

18:18 And I linked to that video as well.

18:20 And it's just, it's super insightful on how, like, ASM.js and WebAssembly can bring things in to this.

18:27 So, like, he has something insane, like, a macOS running Firefox.

18:32 And in Firefox, there's, like, Windows running, which is running Chrome.

18:37 Or something super, like, Inception-like based on just this ASM.js.

18:41 And WebAssembly could go farther.

18:42 So it's really cool.

18:43 Nice.

18:44 Yeah.

18:44 Anyway, just wanted to give sort of a highlight to that project.

18:47 I think actually creating this myself is probably beyond my understanding of CPython.

18:53 But I would love for this to exist.

18:54 Yeah.

18:54 And then we'll have to hit you up on that backflip.

18:56 Yeah, exactly.

18:57 I will do it maybe on something soft.

19:00 Maybe in a gymnastics place.

19:02 But, yeah, I'll definitely do it.

19:03 All right.

19:03 So very cool project.

19:05 It's not directly relevant, but it has massive parallels in the Python space.

19:09 So that would be cool.

19:10 Anything else you want to share with us, Brian, while we're all here?

19:12 No, I'm good.

19:13 Nice.

19:13 How about you?

19:14 I want to share two things.

19:15 One, we were talking before about my Building Data-Driven Web Apps course that's being well-received.

19:20 If you want to learn about building data-driven web apps in Python, check that out.

19:24 Put the link at the bottom.

19:25 Another one, someone sent in on Twitter to us just highlighting Guido Van Rossum's final presentation.

19:33 At the time, I don't think that he knew that it was his final presentation, but he gave a sort of closing the conference talk at PyCascades called a Python 3 retrospective.

19:45 And so just highlighting, like, here's his last official as BDFL presentation might be interesting to some people.

19:52 Yeah.

19:52 Yeah, it was a good talk.

19:53 I was there.

19:53 Okay.

19:54 I'll have to check that out.

19:55 I haven't seen it.

19:55 Yeah, yeah.

19:56 It's pretty good.

19:57 All right.

19:57 Well, Brian, thanks for being here and sharing everything you have.

20:01 Oh, yeah.

20:01 Thank you.

20:02 Yep.

20:02 Bye.

20:02 Bye.

20:03 Thank you for listening to Python Bytes.

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20:18 We're always on the lookout for sharing something cool.

20:21 On behalf of myself and Brian Okken, this is Michael Kennedy.

20:24 Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues.