#495 Banned

0:00Hello and welcome to Python Bites where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. This is episode 495 recorded on Tuesday, September 8th. I'm Galvan Hendricks Parker and I'm Michael Kennedy. Glad to have you, Michael. If you want to support the people who make this possible, make sure you support our sponsors, the fine folks at, oh, talk Python. Make sure you check out Michael's courses. He is doing incredible work over there. It's a great way to brush up on some technology you weren't sure about. Try something new. He's got some nearly cool notes. You just released a couple of new courses, right? Yeah, we just released a Rust course, which I think is really nice. Yeah, very cool. And then also check out the fine folks over at 6 feet up. They are the ones who love solving hard problems. They do a lot of Python work. They've been around for 27 years and we'd love to talk to you about doing some cool projects. If you want to connect with the hosts online, you can find Michael and myself and the show on Macedon, Blue Sky and X. You can also find Michael and I on LinkedIn. But make sure you join us on YouTube for the live stream at pythonbytes.fm slash live

1:03to be part of the audience. Usually it's Tuesday morning's Pacific time. Older, redo versions are available there too. And finally, if you want our artisanal digest of every week's show notes in email form, add your name to our friends of the show list and we'll never share it. But you'll get a really cool recap of everything we talked about. Michael, thinking about recaps, what you got? I always look forward to when the videos of the conferences come out. How about you? Same. I do too. I mean, a lot of times I met the conference and I just miss a great talk and I'm so glad that many of the good ones are recorded. Exactly the same. And sometimes you don't miss it because you just weren't there's trade-offs, right? Like I'm going to go to that talk instead of that one or oh, there's a really interesting group of people having this conversation and the talk is starting now. You got to decide, do I join the group and have the experience that's not going to be recorded or do I go to the talk? So Euro Python, 2026 has all of the videos out. And I realized I need to update my what I put in the show notes because this is just my subset. So if

2:09you want to watch all the talks for Euro Python, 117 videos are now on YouTube, which is great. That is fantastic. And quick because the conference should happen. Yes, I know it's really, really good. And I went through and said, hmm, what might make an interesting thing that I personally would be interested in? There's not a voting, there's not a ranking, this is not a good bad. This is Michael wants to watch this for two reasons. Either one is relevant to me or I might be considering it for a talk Python episode. Like for example, the very first one by Giovanni Bairrilli-Ari is already out over on Dog Python. Oh nice. As the latest, he did a cool project rewriting Async IO from a perspective of what if there was only free threaded Python? You wouldn't write Async IO exactly the same because you have the potential to split that work across multiple threads where Async IO is single threaded, that are, et cetera. So I'm finding these really interesting. We've got

3:10Marlene Magami, her talk or keynote is up updates on the jit update on free threaded Python by Thomas Worders. Paul Everett is in here somewhere because I have not watched his talk yet. I really want to because he talks a lot about the future of AI driven development and local models and controlling your destiny and your data. Yeah, exactly. So for an Australaski, the ploying, while Python web apps, I will Vincent probably with the leading towards Django hint to your topics maybe. Maybe. Anyway, I thought I would make my, like this morning, I did it, made my watch list public because I don't know, I went through all 117 videos and said, okay, maybe probably. And now I'm standing on the 29. So people can check that out or they can just look at the full list. I love they make it a watch list. So you get Michael's curated version. And so I can go enjoy what I, what you think might be important because maybe I follow some of our topics. So I think more folks should do that with conference videos because it's so hard to go to, I mean, you said,

4:14117 videos, what you said. Yes. Yeah. At the lot, at the lot of time to invest. I would, I would venture there's probably not a single person that watches all videos all the way through, you know, that would be hard. That would be super hard. That's just a lot of time. It's a lot of time. Well, and I just got back from Django cotton, which was in Chicago. And at the same time, just shortly afterwards, the PyCharm folks and the Django software foundation have released the 2026 state of Django. And I love so that William Vincent also published this over on the PyCharm blog. I love the fact that it's called boring is back. If you've ever read the blog post about boring tokens, like you only get to have so many new shiny technologies, shiny tokens. You only get so many new shiny technologies in your project. The good news is you can have Django and you can have Postgres. And they're both considered very boring and very stable. If you look through here, it's very thriving. Postgres is actually the database of choice for almost 80% of the respondents

5:18who are doing Django work out there, which I think is a really telling mark. Another nice thing to see here is 43% are already on Django 6.0 after months after it's shipped. So folks are staying up to date and pretty well on the stable side of things. It's 3500 Django developers across more than 40 countries. So it's a fairly good representation of the world's issues of Django. I'm sure statistically I think that that's a pretty big sample size. Yeah, I mean they do do you get a good job of promoting it across multiple podcasts and conferences and things like that. I think it's been really well received. They got a nice little infographic here. What I thought was interesting is this relates to maybe a future topic of yours. HGMX is closing in on React for the front end. You see here we've gone from 2025, 26% of projects maybe using or we're using HGMX to now 34% catching up to React, which is only at 38% on the front end. I'm I'm pro that. I think that the a really great sign of maybe people are looking for the simpler, more boring side of the web

6:23and Django is a great place to do it. Now folks obviously using AI. So it's interesting that they had a couple special sections in here. AI's mainstream, but no workflow is one. So whether they're using it all the time, several days a week, once or more often, AI is dominating the workflow, but it's still supervised, which I think it should be. The AI is here to make us better developers, not replace us as developers. I think we've seen that time and time again as we talk about AI on the various shows. And so the report here, the stats definitely show it. I mean, that's the way to get the most out of these tools. VM is still the top of the list for managing your Python environment. Not necessarily your Python dependencies, but the Python environment. I have a feeling UV will overtake here real soon, because once you see UV work for getting your Python version, it's hard to go back seeing how fast and easy that is to be managed. Docker at 31%, so I'm also quite excited to see the fact that folks are containerizing and just using the Python coming out of the containers. That's also a very simple and easy way to just get started on the right foot with Python and

7:27Django is used Python as already in a Docker container. Yeah. Yeah. And we're both on team Docker. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And in fact, I'm on on team VE and V in Docker or consistency across the Dev workflow. We panic. You're right. I'm on actually I use Docker, but a standard container and install my own UV Python VUV for consistency. Exactly. Same. I don't want to pick some pre-made thing. Python comes with it. It's so easy to install Python into it. Pick more specifically, I think. And you run into weird edge cases. If you start just coloring slightly outside of the lines with one of the standard Python ones, it could be a dependency or just a weirdness of you want to install something and it gets hard. So I find just going with a standard Debian container with the UV to install this way to go. Rough top of the list for code tooling. No surprises there. I think we should see more pre-commit coming up given what we'll see down here later.

8:29There's lots of testing going on. AI's right in our code. Verification matters more. You see right here, Pytest 45%. So we will we see lots more testing happening, which I think is also a very good sign. And I'll talk a little bit about that in my second article as well. So I think yeah, go check it out. This was also part of a fundraiser. So if you are renewing your PyTry and Pro license or looking for one, you can get 30% off. And then you also get 100% of that purchase price goes to the Django software foundation. So not an ad for PyTry and necessarily, but they are doing good out there in the world. I like I like a lot about this. Specifically, I also think this is a more a deeper view into Python in general. When I saw the headline for the survey, I thought, it's going to survey Django things like who's using this feature that ORM and then who's deploying this way versus that way. And no, it's more of a general thing. Just let's ask the Django people. What they're doing. What they're up to. Yeah. Yeah. No, really good stuff. It is good stuff. I'm glad you

9:30covered it. Speaking of good stuff. Well, I mean boring is good. But you mentioned HTMLX. Well, HTMLX4 is now out. And that's officially released officially in it's a Jeep. No, it's not excuse me. No, it's a it's a it's a lay in cruiser. I believe not a Jeep. Anyway, there's a big picture on the announcement of some well, that same that's the same cover art for the Game Boy color characters that they produced in the announcement as well, which I have. You have. Okay. I have I've been playing it too. So it's like a person for doing that in the release HTMLX4.000. Yeah, for non-zero, for it says after eight months of work, plus a game. And if you go to the game, it's this is the real game boy cartridge you can get. Yeah. Yeah. I have said cartridge is not made up. It's legitimately a cartridge you can play through. If you play all the way through your reward is to see the source code for HTMLX4. Oh, incredible. All right. So there's a lot of a lot of interesting

10:35changes here. I think first of all, HTMLX has been really broadly adopted by people who are just like, I don't want to I don't want to take on a react from the framework or something like that. Even though all of the AI tools leap at using React for stuff, it's still really popular, which I think why do you want to develop your models twice? Yeah. Why do you want a bunch of build steps and all that stuff just just to get your app out. And yeah, if you don't need it, yeah, don't go all in. Also, a lot of these front end frameworks, not HTMLX, but many of them encourage you to treat your back end as a dumb pipe that just routes data to the front end where the smarts live. And it's fine if you want to write your code on the front end in JavaScript, but if you want to leverage the things that are really nice about Django or Flask or whatever you're writing against and just Python in general, well, then it kind of undermines that, right? Yeah. But it's the last you just stay in the batteries included role, especially with Django,

11:37like all the HTML like filters and helpers that are built in to Django, the framework are all very useful with a tool like this. They become useless if you're on React, like you're right and kind of to use it. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So major changes attribute inheritance is now explicit. It's a little is on a Python, isn't it? So it used to be you could do like an HX-confirm. And if some action was going to happen first, a dialogue would pop up and say, are you sure you want to delete all the data? As you would say, yes or no. But you could put that and say a div that contains some elements and then there was a button way down and if you click the button, the confirm would fire. That no longer happens. So you have to explicitly say at the top in the confirm and I want this to cascade down to the children. I guess part. Yeah. Except for that it stops working. That's still a problem on the older code. So there's an upgrade path. It's not major, but there is I mean, it's kind of a fine and replace upgrade path. So it's not a huge deal. The name has been changed a little bit. Yeah. I'll go through some examples. I guess. So the other,

12:41it's like you could do it HX-confirm and then a button with an HX delete. And now you've got to say colon inherited. The event or I also used to be able to say dis-inherit so you could block a child from having stuff inherited upon it. Leave this part alone. Get away from me. Now that's gone. That now is gone because you just that's the default is not to inherit. So you don't have to say don't don't cascade it down. Some event rename here's the find and replace. Right. So it used to be HMX before request. Now it's HTMX colon before colon request and so on. What else a history? This is actually I didn't know this was happening. This is not ideal. So history support allows you go forwards and backwards even if so your forwards and backwards can navigate between HTMX events. Not through just the page loads. Right. So if I click the button. Yeah. And it doesn't load it change to something else and I click another maybe another row in a grid and a master detail like another detail thing. Yeah. Load. You can go backwards forwards between those. I didn't know this. It used

13:45to be that in HTMX 2 the way backwards and forward worked is it would save a copy of the pages for restoration and local storage. You forget the storage part like wait what if that data changed? Like there's two hard things. Yeah dangerous. Exactly. There's like two hard things in computer science. Caching naming things and off by one here's right. Love that. That's over. Yeah. It's there for a reason. The cash is super hard. And this was so like I thought it was just reloading it. What's going on? So anyway, that's gone. Nice. It literally reloads it like I always thought it did. So there's that. And the last one is well there's like two things. There's morph swaps. So what this is. I'd to look at this up folks. It is a morph swap is that instead of saying this portion of the page is changing. So we're going to get the new partial fragment from the server and just replace that. A morph swap will rewrite the DOM to match the new segment. So for example, it doesn't

14:45you know jump around as much and those kinds of things right. If maybe only some tiny element even though you replace the whole section changes. It's like okay. We'll just change the little element because you know again master detail like there's a whole structure of the HTML there but really as you click from page to page it's just the values inside that structure. That sounds hard to the framework but much easier for the end user who's building with the framework. Exactly. Let them suffer. Apparently they did the suffering for us which I love. Yes. That's I mean honestly it's not the point of a framework. It is. I mean why would you do the framework if you're not going to otherwise you just do. And then the HX partial tag. So this for out of band changes. This is where H2Mx used to be really brutal and honestly I've worked out a project before and in the end I'm like oh I've kind of wish I didn't choose H2Mx for this because I want to update something over here, answer it over there and this part here and it was tough. So this was you'd classify a partials and then elements of it that change right so pretty neat. That's

15:48what allows you to sort of glue that stuff together. Very nice. Yeah so there it is. They definitely get best mulch swag gifts or whatever the the Game Boy cartridge over the top and real. I love it. I know. The website you can go to the website and play it too but I didn't even have the emulator version. That's cool so everyone can enjoy if you don't have a Game Boy but that's crazy right. It is super great. It works. It's a beautiful cartridge really well done. Like the game was surprisingly well done for I can't imagine how much time they spent on it. Well Carson definitely is known for interesting and catchy stuff so well played. Well played. Well played. Well played. I love it. Oh it's awesome. Yeah it's head over. You mentioned some Zen of Python things so for the final news article for me this is actually a local Indie Pie person. He presented about two Indie pies ago Kyle from Testable. Give a little nice little blog post about Functionally Zen and I kind of like going back over Zen of Python

16:54things is one of my favorite talks to give at Python and other conferences is something more around these initial tenets of Python and simplicity and why we love it and for those of you don't know you can go to your command line you can type Python minus M this and you will see the Easter egg which is the Zen of Python that is in Python. Everyone should print it out. They should frame it and you should put it in your above your sink when you brush your teeth at night so you can read it every night and you'll become a better human being instantly because you've got the Zen of Python available to you but Kyle took the Zen of Python and he actually put tech took kind of added into it like seven extra tenets for Python simplicity so he took specifically the simple as better than complex tenet of Python and then added these seven additional pieces that are about idimatic code data pure functions being simpler than impure functions kind of goes on like and functions being maybe simpler than than classes so it's just a way to think about how to keep your code

17:56again simple there's no reason to get overly complex if you don't have to and Python gives you all the tools that are right here so you can talk about again he talks about being idimatic there's things you need to watch out for for example side effects especially with classes that have constructors that can have side effects in subclasses that you aren't aware of so it just adds to the complexity and overhead as a developer some good examples in here so if you looked at the idimatic code is simpler than non idimatic code some functional programmers might be tempted to use the map function of Python to extend a list but there's actually simpler way just using a list comprehension is actually a clear probably cleaner way for writing what you're looking for there so this actually you know loop series does the x times two for x and a list of one two three so now you've got two for sometimes I think even better performance yeah hugely but a little bit well now the dock should be able to tell us right because I've got the oh notation nice for those things in there it's right right in the docs data is simpler than functions this was a little harder to do I

18:59think the example was a little contrived because if you have an object that has age with a sub sub element of weight and sub element of lab measurement I don't know if you'd have that structure in a cell at time but if you can get your data structured that way it's probably easier to use again a dictionary look up and actually it's probably faster to use a dictionary look up then it is to run a function that would be taking in arguments and looking up things based on those arguments so I some some mostly degree with with that example this is about the impure functions or pure functions versus impure so this this pure function for example your certain is always going to return an integer like it has a reliable return to it this the second example where they're talking about fetch doubles the first one was like a double we just to return x times two so doubles the number the second one which was like fetch under double it actually uses requests to get the response and then it tries to return the body looking for an answer key that is not as stable it could be it returns to you or for it could be the returns of five iron

20:02server error could be they return some other if it developed or makes a mistake someplace some other not expected answer or a string so that's just an example of what I didn't return it a hundred seven like no right not a powerful right and then that the pure functions versus classes I mean if you look at the example here a function you can do is simply is and as simply as two lines with a definition of the function in return when you start talking about classes you just get a lot more boilerplate going on inside the class so if you don't need the classes there's probably no reason to to go that direction it kind of goes on and on here with more more examples that just show some you know some simpler ways to do that this is the last one I'll I'll talk about which is the side effects if you have a class that has a constructor in it so you've defined a dunder a knit method that dunder a knit can affect subclasses and you may not be aware of it because you've not looked at the code for it so they have a time client example here with a dunder a knit that initializes a token using a request post so it actually makes an API call in the

21:05base class these other ones for time service and time controller are calling a constructor that uses that client which means that every one of these will also make an API request so you may want to manage that a little cleaner and reduce them or say for example external calls we're making in that case the last bit I'll call out in honor of Brian Ockin and his lean td book test with no mocking are simpler than tests with mocking I think we can all agree but I think there's a world that needs to hear it and there's a book about it so if you check out Brian's lean tdd book he talks about this as well as part of that book so I thought that was pretty apt and timely that this came up and thanks Kyle for helping remind folks of the simpler ways and in the nice idioms that Python gives us out of the box I really like it I remember when I first got into Python I hear Python I'm like but I need examples these words are great but give me examples so much yeah I learned by example and this these are just great examples of like oh that's how I should do that okay I can follow that pattern every time yeah absolutely that's good

22:08stuff speaking of following pattern your your screens already up maybe just take the extra yeah I think that I'll go the extras first and continuing in my three week streak of talking about UV releases and new features the latest one released four days ago UV 0.12.10 now ships the trusted publisher token revocation and it has Python 315 support so UV is on a terror of keeping up with all the latest bits that are going on including the Python 315 releases coming up so that's really cool that they're doing that and then the other bit I saw a fun little right release here making a Python interpreter in 1,024 bytes so kind of a little example of if you've ever done code golf do something in such and such a number of steps this person implemented a full Python interpreter in 1,024 bytes of good old C code so that's pretty wild I think you first attempted with 512 bytes

23:09which seems kind of crazy yeah good for you to listen the subtitle was 512 bytes it's not enough right no kidding wow so yeah he chronicles his whole journey I just thought that was fun not necessarily a full news article but it's pretty cool the people are doing stuff like this that's a minified Python not something you normally see right but yeah wow okay I just got a one quick one steering council elections are going on so check them out the schedule is the voting period oh two week nomination period followed by a voting period when is this actually I saw that the votes were coming up I don't see the actual anyways previously been November through December or November through November I think it's not yet up or just started anyway this is the 2026 one and so candidates the nominees are here lots and lots I see yeah yeah yeah it's a good list so check it out folks and yeah so anyway I just want to give a shout out to that being a thing

24:10Michael you're going to need jokes worse I have a band joke you like the band show oh my god you mean like band is not allowed we're gonna be kicked off a YouTube and all the just a loud out we're only get kicked off right this is not a like a trombone versus trumpet like what can you do with a trombone you get like hit him with a little like slider thing I don't know I said play a trombone I've really enjoyed it though it was a requirement no the joke is you know keep in mind this is not programming exactly it's IT but I think we can all just like enjoy a little IT stuff you know and it says what single word in IT makes you look like this and there used to be a picture that had a like I can't take it anymore and sorry this poster is removed by reddit filters and all it was was a picture of somebody making a weird face like honestly I don't know what was wrong with it but someone got up and I this one this one took me a minute to understand what the heck it was it said hello do you know what this is about this why would this make IT people wig out maybe you know

25:13I don't know I didn't it it's apparently on teams or slack if somebody just says hello and then they're going to write more but then they kind of don't you like I okay that that could make me a little okay let's go okay all right not a single word but anytime I get a direct message along the lines you got a minute or can I ask a question yes exactly oh let's see so I got to collapse them because they all go down it like this versus printer just no no what year is this and we still can't reliably print I know I just this other just it like last week I print maybe twice a year and I just need a print and it's like the printer's out of eat like I just bought it and haven't printed since the last time I'm editing anyway but as in not to interrupt your lunch but you add in a well actually yeah Rico or scan to mail now I get hello that's pretty good yeah so all right now now I'm I'm in my zone now DNS there's even like a little like

26:18um Japanese style like water painting it says it's not DNS there's no way it's DNS it's always DNS like some philosopher yeah in the early days of six feet up Gabrielle made a comic about DNS because it was so hard to explain to folks and and every time I say there's a problem she's like it's a DNS and so this is my co founder partner in life and she totally gets it DNS is absolutely the problem this one might be for me outlook crowd strike I'll just not ever since you oh this one oh my god ever since you XYZ that's how the work you do or update yeah that's why it's updates not in there oracle I'm on that bandwagon um SharePoint let's see what else we got cv or just Citrix teams SAP you got my voter and SAP oh my gosh anyway I thought this was a really fun list I don't understand what does it go thread I don't understand why they banned it but whatever now that makes it is ready apparently yeah I know awesome I put stuff up there and it'll be

27:19like well it looks like you're trying to share an announcement and that's not allowed so blocked like just I wrote a blog post I thought this community would think was interesting so I wanted to share it it's like I'm not selling you anything I promise not in this case anyway not you know not on on my blog sorry Michael not allowed banned banned well that was a good episode yeah better hang it out and we'll see you all next week I'll still be in France next week I believe or voire voire