PyCon Rehearsal 2: Laziness, Mongo, and Immutability

Rehearsals for PyCon (and other) presenters, sponsored by GenePeeks

Title Available On Request: An Introduction to Lazy Evaluation

Joe Jevnik

Lazy evaluation, also known as "call by need", is an evaluation strategy where values are produced only when needed. Lazy evaluation is the opposite of eager evaluation, Python's normal evaluation model, where functions are executed as seen and values are produced immediately.

In this talk we will define lazy evaluation and contrast it with eager evaluation. We will discuss tools that exist in Python for using lazy evaluation and show how we can build on the primitives to better represent computations. We will introduce common vocabulary for discussing evaluation models, and compare different systems for implementing lazy evaluation. Finally, we will discuss optimizations that can be made to optimize lazily evaluated expressions.

Analyzing Math Literacy Data with PyMongo

Robyn Allen

In an effort to study how high school students develop persistence in technical domains, we wrote a Python/Flask/MongoDB app which serves math problems. This talk will explain what data the app logs, how that data is stored, and how to use PyMongo (a Python driver for MongoDB) to analyze that data.

Immutable Programming - Writing Functional Python

Calen Pennington

The world of Haskell and functional programming may seem like a distant place to many working Python developers, but some of the techniques used there are remarkably useful when developing in Python.

In this talk, I will cover some of the pitfalls of mutability that you may run into while writing Python programs, and some tools and techniques that Python has built in that will let you avoid them. You'll see namedtuples, enums and properties, and also some patterns for structuring immutable programs that will make them easier to build, extend, and test.

(https://us.pycon.org/2017/schedule/presentation/769/)

Pizza will be provided.