news, concurrent.futures, and a code kata

What better way to start off the new year than to talk about futures - Python's concurrent.futures, that is.

Python 3.2 introduced the futures module (http://docs.python.org/dev/library/concurrent.futures.html) to unify the multithreading and multiprocessing models. It's an asynchronous API modeled on Java's java.util.concurrent.Future, and similar to C++11's promises.

Thankfully, you don't have to be running 3.2 in order to use the API. There's a backport (http://packages.python.org/futures/) to use the API on 2.x versions of Python.

Andrew will describe the reasoning behind the effort, walk through some examples of how to use the API, and describe a little about the work I've been doing with the module.

As usual, we'll start off with news from the worlds of Python and programming, so bring in some neat information.

After the presentation, Emily will run a code kata.