They call themselves Pythonistas and more than 500 of them
got together on December 16 at Pakistan’s first-ever Python Conference, PyCon.
Being
hailed as the programming language of the future, Python is fast
revolutionising the world. Python is growing rapidly among the
high-income countries of the world. From support systems to robotics and
from banking to healthcare, there isn’t much the Python language isn’t
being used to develop. Google, Instagram, Quora, Mozilla, NASA and more
are either running on Python or have used elements from it to support
their framework.
But Pakistan, along with other developing countries, seems to have missed the memo on this important update.
PyCon Pakistan was an effort to bring the local industry up to speed on the language and its applications, especially in areas like artificial intelligence and robotics.
The audience at the event was a diverse mix – students,
teachers, freelancers and professionals all came together from across
the country to attend. And what began as an exercise in community
building turned into something bigger. The event wasn't just a typical
techie conference. Despite having a highly focused audience, it had
enough juice to keep even complete newbies hooked.
“I’ve
never worked in machine learning, despite working in Python. So this
event is basically helping me learn a good number of things – this is
easy access to best practices around the world,” a software engineer
present at the event told me.
The event took care to
address the various needs of its audience. Attendees could pick up talks
that were for beginners if they were looking to learn from the start –
or go for the advanced sessions if they were already part of the Python
family.
Zahra Khan, a senior developer who has been
working in PHP, came to the event to find out more about the scope of
Python. “I’m trying to see whether this is something I, along with the
team I lead, should be switching to,” she said.
“From the new bots to self-driving cars, there is a lot you can do with this language,” she added.
Even excited students had grand ideas on what they could do
with the language. Jamal Butt, a student attending the event, decided he
wanted to work on robotics and drones.
The sessions
even attracted entrepreneurs who are in the process of switching to the
language. “We have been recently shifting most of our projects to Python
because I know it is growing to be one of the most popular languages in
the world,” shared Daniyal Zahid.
A welcoming community
Speaking at the event were some of the biggest names in the industry from around the world.
“Raymond
Hettinger is like the Shahrukh Khan of the Python community,” says an
attendee. "Hettinger has been working with the language for 15 years,
during which time he has created multiple tools and trained more than
4,000 engineers."
David Beazley opened his keynote
speech with a trombone performance. Beazley is an important name in the
Python world, and his presence at the event meant that they were walking
away with rich content.
"I've been involved with
Python for more than 20 years, and have always found it to have a highly
enthusiastic and welcoming community. The community thrives when people
give back to it, so I always welcome opportunities where I can share my
own enthusiasm for Python. Also, in times like this where there is so
much fear and division, it is even more important to cultivate
communities that bring people together. Even though I couldn't attend in
person, it was fun and an honor to speak at the first event.” Beazley
said while explaining how he became part of the event.
The event may have been the first effort to bring
together the Python community in the country, but you wouldn’t be able
to tell from the number of people that showed up.
“PyCon
in the UK has been taking place for about 10 years, and it was only
this year that they managed to pull together 700 people – this event
started with more than 500 people the first time we did it,” Nudrrat
Khawaja, one of the organisers, said at the event.
A world of predictions
Maria Shoaib, a speaker at the event, calls herself a Python
enthusiast and talked about the basics of machine learning at the
event. She highlighted the extent to which data can be used to make life
easier.
“You can predict so many different things with
Python. You can predict things like network failures, and predict in
advance when a fibre optic cable will fail. You can predict earthquakes
in advance or even natural disasters – there are numerous applications
of this,” she said.
Ammara Laeeq, another trainer at the
event, echoed Maria’s sentiments. She covered the subject of chat bots
and Facebook messengers at the event. “A chat bot is a program that can
talk like a human.
Businesses today are deploying bots
to interact with their online customer base. Imagine ordering a pizza
and getting it to your doorstep without ever talking to a human being,”
she said excitedly.
Opportunities for the future
Python as a language may be the new kid on the block, but it
has fast become the most popular one too. The TIOBE Index ranks it as
the fourth most popular programming language. It has the fifth largest
StackOverflow Community (basically a forum in the world, with 85.9k
followers and around 500,000 questions.
And PyCon could not have come to Pakistan at a better time.
“We
are really passionate about building a community of Python programmers,
because it is the language to get behind these days. This is definitely
going to be the language of the next 10 years also,” Yasser Bashir, CEO
Arbisoft explained.
“We are entering a new age where
much of the research and many technologies being deployed will rely on
Python's problem solving capabilities – you can use it to solve real
problems of the modern world,” he added.