Lazy sequences working hard

2017-05-16 • , • Comments

I gave a talk @PyDiff this evening in the computer science department at Cardiff University.

Lazy Sequences working hard

Python has no problem handling large and even infinite streams of data. Just write lazy programs — code which defers data access until the last minute. This talk examines Python’s language and library support for such delaying tactics. There will be live coding, and we’ll draw parallels with similar features in other languages, in particular the Unix shell.

Being unsure where to pitch it, I started off easy and kept going until I’d lost everybody — including myself.

The room was well set up with a good quality projector and whiteboard, along with a desk to sit down when I wanted to write and run code and plenty of space to move around in otherwise. I did feel a bit like a jack-in-the-box by the end.

Me @PyDiff

I’d based the talk on a Jupyter notebook which I replayed with the ingenious RISE reveal.js extension written by Damian Avila. This worked well, since I got the pretty graphics along with the interactive coding. A static version of the slides is available here.

Thanks to everyone who came. Sorry I had to rush off after. If anyone would like to talk at Swansea, please let me know: you’d be most welcome.