Same with pandas... 😅

For several years it's been possible to have a Python terminal in the browser. pythonanywhere.com was probably among the first to provide this. More recently, mybinder.org offered a full Jupyter experience without the need to install anything locally. All these technologies had a JavaScript terminal in the browser, and a backend able to run Python code, that was costly to host.

Just few days ago it was announced a new paradigm to the game: JupyterLite. A JavaScript terminal, powered by WebAssembly (using Pyodide). The idea is similar for the terminal, but there is no need for a backend, since Python is executed in the client browser using WebAssembly. You can deploy a 100% static site, and your users will be able to execute Python code. It also can provide complex dependencies like numpy and pandas.

You can read more in this blog post: https://blog.jupyter.org/jupyter-everywhere-f8151c2cc6e8 and you can try it in numpy.org. It takes a while to execute the first cell, while it needs to download and load all files internally required, but after that wait, it's fast and seems to work quite nicely.

If reading programming books was just as effective....

A short list of movie classics about free software, computers and data:

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

TRON (1982)

WarGames (1983)

The Matrix (1999)

Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)

Revolution OS (2001)

Antitrust (2001)

The Code (2001)

CitizenFour (2014)

The Imitation Game (2014)

More suggestions? Add a comment.

Thanks Linus and team for 17 years of amazing version control

Sometimes bash can be a pretty decent analytics tool. For example, this oneliner command outputs the top 10 pandas contributors in 2018 based on the git log:


$ git log --pretty=format:%ci,%an | grep "^2018-" | cut -d"," -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n10
    346 jbrockmendel
    216 Tom Augspurger
    103 gfyoung
     99 Joris Van den Bossche
     96 Jeff Reback
     89 Matthew Roeschke
     78 Marc Garcia
     62 William Ayd
     51 topper-123
     50 h-vetinari

Seems like the most popular topic at PyCon US is PyScript, a WebAssembly framework to be able to use Python in HTML, as it's commonly done in JS using <noscript> tags. You can see a hello world example here.

Personally, I don't see the value of trying to use Python for everything. Python is an amazing technology for many use cases. But there are many other applications that could better be done with other languages, in this case JavaScript.

Some other examples are Cython, a brilliant technology to transpile Python-like code to C, and compile it. But therr are probably better languages to do that. Another example is MyPy, to bring type annotations and validation to a previously dynamically typed language like Python. Making the syntax probably too complex for the value it adds. And there are many other examples.

I wonder if it'd make more sense to use Rust, Julia, Go, Lua... for many of these use cases Python is trying to conquer. And focus on making Python better for what it was good initially (adding multithreading, better packaging, smarter handling of single type lists, just in time compiling...).

Interesting benchmark on array computing in the browser: https://jott.live/markdown/wasm_vector_addition

One of the most interesting talks I watched in a long time. About the imminent financial collapse, the nonsense of how the software industry works, how both are connected, and what as a software professional (in particular a manager) you can do about it.

Be ready for 1h20m of bad news. 😉

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSEb0_2hb0

I can relate 😂😂😂

Interesting article about databases vs dataframes. A lot of work is being done in this area besides Modin (the authors of the article). For example, Ibis, polars or datafusion.

https://ponder.io/pandas-vs-sql-food-court-michelin-style-restaurant/

Looks like I'll be the release manager for pandas 1.5. Expect it in around a month

I had pending reinstalling my system for couple of years, but I finally had the time. Those are the main updates:

Fedora -> EndeavourOS (Arch)
Mate -> KDE Plasma
Bash -> zsh
Vim -> nvim

Each of the new software seems like a very good improvement compared to the previous.

The release candidate for pandas 1.5.0 is now ready to try, and we plan to release the final version in around two weeks. For more detailed info check the official announcement in the @pandas_dev channel.