Luciano Ramalho on Python’s features and libraries

The O’Reilly Programming Podcast: A look at some of Python’s valuable, but often overlooked, features.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk about Python with Luciano Ramalho, technical principal at ThoughtWorks, author of the O’Reilly book Fluent Python, and presenter of the Oriole Fluent Python: The Power of Special Methods.

Discussion points:

• The value of some often-overlooked features of Python, including generators, iterators, and the range() function.
• How Python’s Asyncio module “brought a definition of what the interface should be for an event loop into the core standard library,” says Ramalho.
• Why Ramalho calls pytest his “go-to library for unit testing, and other kinds of testing.”
• Striving to avoid surprises and trying to follow the conventions of the language are two characteristics of what Ramalho describes as a “good Pythonic API.”
• The work of the Python Software Foundation to increase diversity in the Python community.

Other links:

• Ramalho’s presentation Fluent Python: Implementing Intuitive and Productive APIs at OSCON 2016
• IEEE Spectrum article on the top programming languages of 2017
• The Zope web application server written in Python