Real Python Podcast Episode #178 Title Artwork

Episode 178: Guiding Scientific Python Library Development

The Real Python Podcast

Oct 27, 2023 57m

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How do you prepare a scientific Python project for sharing with others? Could you use some best practices and guidance for packaging, documentation, and testing? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

We talk about the creation of the Scientific Python Library Development Guide. The guide was finalized during the 2023 Scientific Python Developer Summit and is a resource for modern packaging. It includes sections of tutorials, principles, templates, and common patterns.

Christopher shares a recent Real Python tutorial about sorting Unicode strings in Python. He covers some of the pitfalls and ways to avoid them. The tutorial includes multiple third-party libraries to assist in wrangling Unicode characters.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a couple of release announcements, information on namespaces and variable scope in Python, benchmark comparisons of Numba and Mojo, a discussion of recent so-called AI fails, a TUI for log files with a merged timeline, a cross-platform GUI building tool similar to HyperCard, and a project for reproducing exact argparse arguments.

Course Spotlight: Exploring Scopes and Closures in Python

In this Code Conversation video course, you’ll take a deep dive into how scopes and closures work in Python. To do this, you’ll use a debugger to walk through some sample code, and then you’ll take a peek under the hood to see how Python holds variables internally.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:30 – Python 3.13.0 alpha 1 is now available
00:03:20 – core.py - Podcast
00:03:53 – PEP 730 - Adding iOS as a supported platform
00:05:22 – Mojo🔥 is now available on Mac
00:06:28 – How to Sort Unicode Strings Alphabetically in Python
00:11:48 – Python Variables: Namespaces and Variable Scope
00:18:18 – Mojo: Head-to-Head With Python and Numba
00:27:25 – Video Course Spotlight
00:28:50 – The Scientific Python Library Development Guide
00:32:47 – I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta
00:48:03 – logmerger: TUI for Log Files With Merged Timeline
00:50:34 – CardStock: Cross-Platform GUI Building Tool
00:54:24 – reverse_argparse: Tell the User What They Ran
00:56:25 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

Show Links:

How to Sort Unicode Strings Alphabetically in Python – In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to correctly sort Unicode strings in Python while avoiding common pitfalls. You’ll explore powerful third-party libraries implementing the complete Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), as well as standard library modules and a few handmade solutions.
Python Variables: Namespaces and Variable Scope – This post is a comprehensive guide on namespaces and variable scope. Learn about the four different namespaces and how to access each.
Mojo: Head-to-Head With Python and Numba – This article covers a Mandelbrot-based benchmark of Python, variations of Numba, and the newly available Mojo. Although Mojo is fast, it takes a lot more work than the author expected to translate Python to it, and with the right parameters, Numba still beats it.
The Scientific Python Development Guide – This article talks about the release of the Scientific Python Development Guide, which documents Python package development. It includes cookie-cutter templates and repo tools.

Discussion:

Projects:

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Level Up Your Python Skills With These Courses:

Unicode & Character Encodings in Python: A Painless Guide

Unicode in Python: Working With Character Encodings

Navigating Namespaces and Scope in Python

Exploring Scopes and Closures in Python

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