Python Byte Episode 28: PEP8, Rust, and Migration

Episode 28 Recap: Python News and Best Practices

In this episode, Michael Kennedy and Brian Akin discuss a variety of tools, coding conventions, and industry success stories that are shaping the current Python ecosystem.

Key Topics

• PEP8 Best Practices: The hosts highlight pep8.org, a beautifully designed style guide that uses color-coded examples to make the official Python style guide more accessible and navigable.
• Async Performance with Rust: An introduction to Tokio (or Tokyo), an experimental project aiming to provide a high-performance event loop for asyncio written in Rust instead of C.
• Command-Line Boilerplate: A fun, interactive web tool, python-boilerplate.com, is introduced for quickly generating project foundations, similar to Cookiecutter but specialized for CLI applications.
• The Instagram Migration Story: A fascinating look at how Instagram successfully migrated their massive, high-traffic codebase from Python 2.7 to Python 3 without stopping feature delivery, emphasizing the power of feature switches and incremental deployment.
• Underscores in Python: A breakdown of the various uses of underscores in code, such as the dunder (double underscore) methods, single leading underscores for private conventions, and the single underscore as a "don't care" variable.

"Blindly following rules is the hobgoblins of little minds." - Discussing the importance of understanding guidelines rather than being a 'PEP8 bully'.

Industry Trends

The episode concludes with an analysis of Stack Overflow data, confirming that Python 3 has officially overtaken Python 2 in popularity and that Python maintains a strong upward trend in industry usage.