Python Bytes
Python Bytes
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Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.

#275 Airspeed velocity of an unladen astropy

March 16, 2022 00:42:43 36.89 MB Downloads: 0

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About the show

Sponsored by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.

Special guest: Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel

Michael #1: Async and await with subprocesses

  • by Fredrik Averpil
  • People know I do all sorts of stuff with async
  • Lots of cool async things are not necessarily built into Python, but our instead third-party packages
  • E.g. files via aiofiles
  • But asyncio has asyncio.create_subprocess_exec
  • Fredrik’s article has some nice examples
  • I started using this for mp3 uploads and behind the scenes processing for us

Brian #2: Typesplainer

Emily #3: Ibis Project

  • via Marlene Mhangami
  • “Productivity-centric Python data analysis framework for SQL engines and Hadoop” focused on:
    • Type safety
    • Expressiveness
    • Composability
    • Familiarity
  • Marlene wrote an excellent blog post as an introduction
  • Works with tons of different backends, either directly or via compilation
    • Depending on the backend, it actually uses SQLAlchemy under the hood
  • There’s a ton of options for interacting with a SQL database from Python, but Ibis has some interesting features geared towards performance and analyzing large sets of data. It’s a great tool for simple projects, but an excellent tool for anything data science related since it plays so nicely with things like pandas

Michael #4: ASV

Brian #5: perflint

  • Anthony Shaw
  • pylint extension for performance anti patterns
    • curious why a pylint extension and not a flake8 plugin.
  • I think the normal advice of “beware premature optimization” is good advice.
  • But also, having a linter show you some code habits you may have that just slow things down is a nice learning tool.
  • Many of these items are also not going to be the big show stopper performance problems, but they add unnecessary performance hits.
  • To use this, you also have to use pylint, and that can be a bit painful to start up with, as it’s pretty picky.
    • Tried it on a tutorial project today, and it complained about any variable, or parameter under 3 characters. Seems a bit picky to me for tutorials, but probably good advice for production code.
    • These are all configurable though, so you can dial back the strictness if necessary.
  • perflint checks:
    • W8101 : Unnessecary list() on already iterable type
    • W8102: Incorrect iterator method for dictionary
    • W8201: Loop invariant statement (loop-invariant-statement) ←- very cool
    • W8202: Global name usage in a loop (loop-invariant-global-usage)
    • R8203 : Try..except blocks have a significant overhead. Avoid using them inside a loop (loop-try-except-usage).
    • W8204 : Looped slicing of bytes objects is inefficient. Use a memoryview() instead (memoryview-over-bytes)
    • W8205 : Importing the "%s" name directly is more efficient in this loop. (dotted-import-in-loop)

Emily #6: PEP 594 Acceptance

  • “Removing dead batteries from the standard library”
  • Written by Christian Heimes and Brett Cannon back in 2019, though the conversation goes back further than that
    • It’s a very thin line for modules that might still be useful to someone versus the development effort needed to maintain them.
  • Recently accepted, targeting Python 3.11 (final release planned for October 2022, development begins in May 2021. See the full release schedule)
  • Deprecations will begin in 3.11 and modules won’t be fully removed until 3.13 (~October 2024)
  • See the full list of deprecated modules
  • Bonus: new PEP site and theme!

Extras

Brian: Michael:

Emily:

Jokes: