Today, at PyGotham 2018, Jason Owen and I presented "Python Grab Bag: A Set of Short Plays".* We predict a videorecording will be on PyVideo in the next few weeks. [Edited 26 November to add: Video is up.]

[Edited 7 February to add: The script is now available, licensed CC-BY.]

Credits

This session is the latest in my line of non-traditional tech talks. I conceived of the idea. Thanks to Jason Owen for working on it with me - thinking of play topics, editing, rehearsing! I wrote almost all of these plays and he made them better. And, as we mentioned in "The Unvarnished Truth", we spent upwards of USD$1650 out of our own pockets on this session -- paying our director and audiovisual assistant, buying props, and renting rehearsal space. Probably closer to $1850 when it all comes in.

Thanks to:

• our director, Aya Aziz
• Sarah Pavis for running sound and slides
• Dustin Ingram for a few cameos as an actor and for help with secondary A/V
• Mike Pirnat, Leonard Richardson, nycsubway.org, the Recurse Center, Elizabeth Yalkut, Betsy Haibel, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, James Vasile, Dave Anderson, Mark Smith, Sam Steinbock-Pratt, Andrea Parsons, and our preview audience for help writing, improving, scoring, rehearsing, illustrating, and making props for these plays
• the Neo-Futurists for their show "The Infinite Wrench" that we took as inspiration
• A. Jesse Jiryu Davis for being our session chair
• PyGotham and you for taking a chance on this ridiculous thing

References

In from import import import,** we mention Allison Kaptur's blog post on import and PyCon 2014 talk "Import-ant Decisions", and George London's PyGotham 2017 talk, "import madness # how to implement mergesort from scratch using only import statements".

In "A Proposal for Explaining PEPs", we briefly mention PEPs 347, 385, and 481, which moved Python development from CVS to Subversion to Mercurial to Git, and PEP 8000, which is working on governance questions.

In "GNU Mailman: A Pythonic Playlist", I discuss the history of Mailman release names.

"Generators: Taste the Freshness" draws on this explanation of generators in Python.

"This Is How We Do It" draws on this history of The Zen of Python, and on Larry Wall's "Perl, the first postmodern computer language".

"If Shakespeare Wrote Incident Reports" starts with a quote from Act I, Scene 5 of Hamlet.

"Code Review: Fast Forward and Back" is a summary of "Code Review, Forwards and Back" which originally appeared at PyGotham 2017 (video).

"Be A Better Bureaucrat (The Intellectual argparse Play)" mentions James C. Scott's Seeing Like A State and David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.

"The End (Of 2.7) Is Near (feat. Jason as Guido van Rossum)" starts by quoting Guido van Rossum's March 10, 2018 email to python-dev. It ends with a short clip from "Get Over It" by OK Go.

Slides & similar

"The Relief of Reuse (The Colorful argparse Play)" has a slide partway through, reading: "Jason switches to the robust, standardized, easy-to-use argparse library".

In general it's hard to see the slides on the videorecording, so here are the slide decks for "from import import import", "A Proposal for Explaining PEPs", "If Shakespeare Wrote Incident Reports", and "When The Old Was New".

In "Things We Don’t Say At The Daily Standup Meeting", the voiceover recording (kind of hard to hear on the recording) is us saying:

 

I don't understand what you just said.
I've done the same thing every day this week but I'm trying to find different words for it.
I can't concentrate on my work and I don't anticipate that changing till, best case, January 2021.
I feel like I got nothing done yesterday.
I am beyond stuck. I am drowning and I need help.

 

* Announcement, context, late-September reflections.

** For reference, in case the PyGotham 2018 site ever disappears, the play titles were:

 

1. The Unvarnished Truth
2. from import import import
3. WHAT’S the DEAL with CLIENTS?
4. A Play Entirely Full of Monty Python References
5. A Proposal for Explaining PEPs
6. GNU Mailman: A Pythonic Playlist
7. Soup, Scrape, Sweep
8. Generators: Taste the Freshness
9. This Is How We Do It
10. Cookie For Your Thoughts
11. If Shakespeare Wrote Incident Reports
12. Code Review: Fast Forward and Back
13. When The Old Was New
14. Things We Don’t Say At The Daily Standup Meeting
15. The Relief of Reuse (The Colorful argparse Play)
16. Be A Better Bureaucrat (The Intellectual argparse Play)
17. Speaking Python
18. The End (Of 2.7) Is Near (feat. Jason as Guido van Rossum)

[Edited to add on 26 November] and the play ordering was:

1. GNU Mailman: A Pythonic Playlist (#6)
2. Things We Don’t Say At The Daily Standup Meeting (#14)
3. A Proposal for Explaining PEPs (#5)
4. The End (Of 2.7) Is Near (feat. Jason as Guido van Rossum) (#18)
5. WHAT’S the DEAL with CLIENTS? (#3)
6. from import import import (#2)
7. A Play Entirely Full of Monty Python References (#4)
8. The Relief of Reuse (The Colorful argparse Play) (#15)
9. Speaking Python (#17)
10. Generators: Taste the Freshness (#8)
11. When The Old Was New (#13)
12. The Unvarnished Truth (#1)
13. This Is How We Do It (#9)
14. If Shakespeare Wrote Incident Reports (#11)
15. Cookie For Your Thoughts (#10)
16. Be A Better Bureaucrat (The Intellectual argparse Play) (#16)
17. Soup, Scrape, Sweep (#7)
18. Code Review: Fast Forward and Back (#12)
19. thank-yous