The second official meeting of the Gothenburg Python User Group was last night. Eight of us turned up, despite my writing the wrong address on my meeting invite. (It is Norra Ågatan 10A, not 6A – sorry!)
Anyway, in the first part of the meeting Jacob Hallen explained about PyPy, a very interesting project. It seems PyPy aims to replace jython, iron python, stackless and a host of other things, and has nearly as good performance as cpython. Jacob reckoned it would be ready for general use in about a year’s time.
After fika, Johan gave a short presentation about how he uses Python at Nordea. Although the company policy is only to use Java and Cobol, he has had some successes with using python too. He’s written several small applications that have been quick and cheap to build and have lasted much longer than their initially projected lifetimes. Unfortunately he hasn’t persuaded anyone else at Nordea to write any python yet.
The coding challenge for the evening was KataRomanNumerals which went very well. We split into four groups and in less than 45 mins three of the groups had working solutions, all different, all elegant in their own way. My group was the one that didn’t come up with a solution and that was because I was more interested in how to define the tests than how to define the solution 🙂 I wanted to write the tests in a spreadsheet then generate unittest test cases. It kind of worked. I will try again another time with FIT instead.
Most importantly, everyone said they enjoyed the evening and the chance to write some python code, just for fun.
