Keynote: Begin...End?

What people said

Qem · 2024-06 · Recommendation

> it is my understanding that what this paper describes was never actually shipped This reminds me of an interesting talk by David Beazley where he discuss the early days of Python, when IIRC he was a student at a national lab, and they managed to run the Python REPL in an connection machine 5 that people had a hard time programming in lower level languages. It seems the work they did back then, writing modules that allowed the Python interpreter to interoperate with scientific code was one of the foundations for it to snowball many years later. So I wonder if what this paper describes had shipped in time, if that would lead us by butterfly effect into the alternative timeline where Lisp dominates scientific computing, instead of Python. See [VIDEO]

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Qem · 2023-08 · Recommendation

According to David Beazley, it was lucky to already being around by the time scientific computing folks were in need for dynamic languages as wrappers to help with increasingly complex hardware and projects written in lower level languages, and the only other viable alternatives back then were Perl and tcl. Watch this talk: [VIDEO] Then it just snowballed since that time.

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jackjackk0 · 2022-03 · Recommendation

I recommend one of the recent videos by Dave Beazly [1]. He lived through and contributed to the raise of Python in scientific computing first hand in the 90s, and offers some interesting insights. Plus he's always quite an entertainer. [1] [VIDEO]

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