Best Speeches of Mr. Hettinger. Part 1

All great things start small. Apple began its journey from a garage. Windows as a group of enthusiasts. Linux was created by a geek who programmed all day long locked in his room from the whole world.

Similarly, every programmer even the most experienced one once was a beginner. He didn't know anything and had no practical skills. He asked for advice regarding each minor issue. And the advisors weren't always people, sometimes they were books, and other times - websites. Either way, at all times it was the human beings who've made the best mentors. Especially those who had a gift to teach others and elaborate about complicated things putting everything in simple words.

Let me introduce you to Mr. Raymond Hettinger - one of the core Python programming language developers. This man is well known for two things. First of all, he was the one who developed such useful and frequently used builtin functions as set(), sorted(), reversed() and many others. Secondly, he possesses that rare gift I've mentioned above - he can explain complex concepts in plain language spiced with humor.

I suggest you become familiar with his 5 best speeches and let him be your mentor for a little while.

1. What Makes Python Awesome

PyCon US 2013

Many people who previously had experience working with Java, C, C++, C# are annoyed with the fact that code written in Python works slower. Well, that's all they can held against this wonderful language. All other things associated with it are solid pluses, like community, libraries, frameworks, ease of learning, writing and reading code, and so on.

If you want to know more on the topic of why Python is a great choice or you have any doubts whether it's worth learning then you definitely need to watch this video with Mr. Hettinger's speech. It will dispel any of your doubts.

2. Python Tips, Tricks and Idioms

When I had just started learning Python one of the biggest surprises for me was how easy you can shorten the code using the assignment operation for several variables in one line at the same time.

For example:

a, b, c = 1, 5, 10
print(a) --> 1
print(b) --> 5
print(c) --> 10

The next pleasant surprise lied in the fact that you are able to mutually change the values of variables also using only one line of code:

a, b = b, a
print(a) --> 5
print(b) --> 1

Believe me, Python possesses many funny and useful things like that. If you are eager to find out more about them then the next video of Mr. Hettinger is for you.

3. Super considered super!

PyCon 2015, Montréal, April 8-16

OOP (Object-oriented programming) is a difficult subject, isn't it? Especially easy your brain is starting to shut down when the created object has many parent classes, which in their turn have many subclasses (child classes).

Mr. Hettinger will help you to figure out all the inheritance intricacies.

4. Beyond PEP 8 - Best practices for beautiful intelligible code

PyCon 2015, Montréal, April 8-16

Everyone wants to write a highly readable code, both for themselves and for the colleagues who probably will have a pleasure of working with it. For this exact reason exists PEP 8 - the style guide for Python code. However, there are some situations when following the PEP 8 recommendations would be simply unreasonable.

In this video Mr. Hettinger will tell you why you should treat PEP 8 as a collection of recommendations rather than a set of strict rules, and what to do in the situations when following those recommendations does not seem possible or is highly undesirable.

5. Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python

PyCon US 2013

This topic is closely linked to the previous one, although in a slightly different way. If the lecture about PEP 8 explains first and foremost the approach to the proper code style then this speech is aimed to show how the poorly written code (from a programming point of view) can be rewritten into a better form by using all of the features of this language.

In case you aren't yet an experienced professional who has been working with Python for years then this video is a must see for you.

Conclusion

It was a review of the 5 best speeches of a widely known in narrow circles Mr. Raymond Hettinger. Please, leave your commentaries below concerning your impressions from his speeches and which video you've liked the most.

Also if you have ideas for the following articles or you know some famous Python programmers who are blogging about Python or can tell about this programming language in a fascinating way, write to us and in one of the next articles you'll definitely read about it.