Blueprints for a Serpent - educational-python-variants

exploration of different python implementations

Presentation Link From Pydistrict:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDnLNSzklzw

Disclaimer and Purpose of This Page

I am not a programming language designer, compiler author, or core developer for python or any other language. At least not yet :).

I am an application programmer with an interest in comparing language implementations and the consequences they have for application programmers. I have not done enough sufficient experimentation to consider myself a practicing language designer or implementor. One of the things I find most exciting about this topic is that it supports and therefore requires some understanding across a deep and varied set of applied programming subjects. So, despite perhaps not being the best tour guide through this subject matter, I did my best to represent this material, and I hope you learn something you didn't know from browsing it.

The purpose of this repository and the presentation it accompanies is to consolidate and share some of what I've learned while trying to understand the benefits of python's approach to language specification and some of the resulting implementations while also trying to learn enough to reason a little about why implementations exist and what they are good for. I have made an effort to both cite sources for instances where I got an idea from somewhere else, and also call out when I'm taking a leap and forming my own opinions based upon what I've read. I hope this can serve as an accelerated start for you if you are interested in learning more about these topics. Thank you for reading!

Repo Navigation

• The Research markdown page contains a cleaned up version of notes I took when digging into this topic with hyperlinks and sources indicated for sections either to credit my sources or provide additional info.

• There are directories in the repo for some of the more popular python implementations. It represents some of what I learned about each with a description and some reference card information talking at a high level about their motivations when I knew of them, features, side benefits, and limitations. If you are interested in contributing more implementation versions or research in to what I have listed, let me know and I can add you as a contributor!

• the Examples directory contains some source code and a guided walk through of the demo that I hope to give as part of the presentation. The goal there is to simulate some scenario where you can try different versions of python on a pretend project so you can get a feel for how you might experiment with and choose between them in practice.