Last night was the Front Range Pythoneers meeting. This is the first one I've been able to make it to, partly because Evelyn had another meeting in Boulder anyway, partly because I had planned to take a vacation day on Wednesday. Here's a recap of the action.

Shortly before the Pythoneers meeting, Evelyn found that they had finally announced (sort of, no directions or anything, but at least a name :-) the location for the Denver Bar Camp next weekend. We're now signed up and Evelyn is contacting them about tummy.com, ltd. sponsoring a meal. I announced that around.

Someone asked if there was actual camping going on, so I also announced that the weekend of September 15th we will be having Baz Camp in Loveland. This is a camping trip, roughing it at a state park with only a megabit or two of wireless connectivity.

It's been quite some time since I've been to a FRPythoneers meeting, and this is the first time I've been since Jim resurrected it. I've been wanting to go, since Evelyn and I started it many many years ago, but just haven't been able to make it. Total attendance was 6.

I prefer meetings that are a little more collaborative. At the few Pythoneers we had in Fort Collins that I ran, I always set aside time for a round-table to get everyone talking about what they were doing with Python. That sort of format works well for getting group participation. This meeting was pretty ad-hoc. It seemed to work well for most people, but I was really wishing I had heard more from the whole group.

Lots of talk was on iterators, which I gather Jim harps on a lot at the meetings. I decided to take a quick look at the itertools module, since I wasn't really familiar with it. My use of Python is often pretty simple, but itertools has some helpers that I could make good use of. the most obvious being itertools.ifilter(), which is an iterator replacement for the filter() built-in. Many more rich tools in there as well.

Jim wants to run a sprint, and was proposing the idea of a cookbook sprint. Write up some recipes that you use but aren't in the cookbook. Other folks seemed to be more interested in a "jam" more than a sprint, trying out web toolkits or that sort of thing.

The biggest thing I got out of the meeting was really a reminder that I should look at itertools. In fact, I should really go through and re-read the standard library documentation again, there's a lot that's been added that I haven't kept up with. On the one hand, I wish the standard library was quite a bit richer. On the other, I haven't kept up with what is in there, so I really shouldn't be complaining. There are things that I think really could use a higher-level interface though.

Funny thing is that shortly before I left, Jim was asking if there was a Python way to do the Perl equivalent of "while (<>)", where it consumes stdin or command arguments... I pointed him at the fileinput module. So, I'm not totally ignorant of the standard library. :-)
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