Protecting The Future Of Python By Hunting Black Swans

Summary The Python language has seen exponential growth in popularity and usage over the past decade. This has been driven by industry trends such as the rise of data science and the continued growth of complex web applications. It is easy to think that there is no threat to the continued health of Python, its ecosystem, and its community, but there are always outside factors that may pose a threat in the long term. In this episode Russell Keith-Magee reprises his keynote from PyCon US in 2019 and shares his thoughts on potential black swan events and what we can do as engineers and as a community to guard against them. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. When you’re ready to launch your next app or want to try a project you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so take a look at our friends over at Linode. With 200 Gbit/s private networking, scalable shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40 Gbit/s public network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. And for your tasks that need fast computation, such as training machine learning models, they just launched dedicated CPU instances. Go to pythonpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! And to grow your professional network and find opportunities with the startups that are changing the world then Angel List is the place to go. Go to pythonpodcast.com/angel to sign up today. You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with the ways that Python is being used, including the latest in machine learning and data analysis. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Upcoming events include the O’Reilly AI Conference, the Strata Data Conference, and the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum. Go to pythonpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email hosts@podcastinit.com) To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at pythonpodcast.com/chat Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Russell Keith-Magee about potential black swans for the Python language, ecosystem, and community and what we can do about them Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you start by explaining what a Black Swan is in the context of our conversation? You were the opening keynote for PyCon this year, where you talked about some of the potential challenges facing Python. What motivated you to choose this topic for your presentation? What effect did your talk have on the overall tone and focus of the conversations that you experienced during the rest of the conference? What were some of the most notable or memorable reactions or pieces of feedback that you heard? What are the biggest potential risks for the Python ecosystem that you have identified or discussed with others? What is your overall sentiment about the potential for the future of Python? As developers and technologists, does it really matter if Python continues to be a viable language? What is your personal wish list of new capabilities or new directions for the future of the Python language and ecosystem? For listeners to this podcast and members of the Python community, what are some of the ways that we can contribute to the long-term success of the language? Keep In Touch BeeWare freakboy3742 on GitHub @freakboy3742 on Twitter Website Picks Tobias Jethro Tull Russell pytest-tldr pdbpp Links PyCon 2019 Keynote Presentation Perth Western Australia Django BeeWare RedHat Emacs Vim Lisp Glyph Twisted Cal Henderson Flickr Slack Black Swan Animal Book Metaphor Nassim Nicholas Taleb PyCon US Ewa Jodlowska Python Software Foundation Podcast Interview Swift JavaScript Django Girls Briefcase packaging tool PyPy Web Assembly (WASM) COBOL Tidelift Cricket unit test runner The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA