Two Speakers: Implement Forth in Python / Better Naming for Code Clarity

Implement a Programming Language: Joe Dougherty

Do you want to implement a programming language but don't know where to start? Have you started doing some research and found yourself immersed in a sea of unfamiliar terms like yacc/bison, (E)BNF, and "Dragon Book"?

Joe Dougherty will give a brief overview of the FORTH programming language, and make the case that the required primitives map cleanly to built-in Python data structures. Subsequently, we'll look at what it takes to implement a FORTH-style interpreter of your own in Python!

Better Naming for Code Clarity: Kurt Wheeler

Code clarity is one of the most important things in software development because it increases the maintainability of code and the ease of sharing it with another programmer and having them understand it. Naming variables, functions, and classes well is crucial to writing maintainable and extendable code. However the culture of Python often seems to encourage brevity over clarity. I will show examples of this in high profile Python projects' tutorials, documentation, and source code. I will discuss ways to write code that is more clear, maintainable, and extendable along with some initial ideas of what the Python community can do to try to reverse this trend.

Kurt Wheeler is a software engineer in the Childhood Cancer Data Lab powered by Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation and a member of the Greene Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Kurt has experience in software development for cloud based workflows, utilizing modern technologies such as Docker, terraform, and Nomad. Kurt is the primary developer of the Data Refinery project which aims to integrate all publicly available genomic and transcriptomic data to facilitate machine learning analyses.