by Brandon Rhodes • Home

The April issue of Python Magazine

Date:	2 May 2009
Tags:	computing, python

It was back in the early 1990s, if memory serves me, that the Coca-Cola company — it may have been in one of their annual reports — decided to change their perspective. They declared that the soft drink market, of which they held more than 50%, was simply too small to remain their focus. Rather than wondering what marketing campaign might allow them to chip away a few more percentage points from their competitors, they drew attention to the fact that Coca-cola products represented only 2–3% of all fluids consumed, worldwide, and started thinking about how to increase that number. They decided, in other words, that their biggest competitor would no longer be Pepsi, but water.

Now, think about the Python programming language, and try the same shift in perspective. Yes, we are all happy that readers of Linux Journal have selected Python as their Favorite Programming Language in this year's “Reader's Choice Awards” and we are pleased when we move up a few more percentage points in something like the TIOBE Programming Community Index. But comparing our market share with that of other programming languages can, too often, fool us into thinking that we are playing a zero-sum game in which our own community can expand only by prying other programmers' fingers off of the languages they currently know and love.

Try something else. Imagine all of the world's people, and ask: what percentage of them use Python? And what might it look like to increase that percentage? You will suddenly think of the grade school down the street, where you could volunteer one afternoon a week teaching Python programming at their computer club. You will realize that the local community college provides a simple IT curriculum, but gives their students no information about getting connected to a local programmer user's group. You will begin to wonder what difference simple Python skills might make in the hands of teenagers, college students, and young families raising children.

You will, in other words, start thinking about how to change the world.

And the reason that I'm excited about the April issue of Python Magazine is that our cover stories focus on Python programmers who, during the recent high-profile United States elections, made this kind of step outward into realizing what Python could do in their communities.

Mitch Trachtenberg has written our feature article, about how his ballot scanning software helped election volunteers and officials in Humboldt County, California, discover that nearly 200 ballots had not been counted by their Premier Elections Solutions voting systems. Thanks to his efforts, California has now de-certified that particular software from being used in elections in their state.
We also have an interview with Neal McBurnett, whose ElectionAudits software automated the statistical calculations in Boulder, Colorado, that allowed their election audits to focus on close races where more ballots have to be checked before a winner can be certified with confidence.
To celebrate the fact that April 22nd was World Plone Day, we feature an Introduction to Plone with instructions for quickly downloading, installing, and customizing this popular Content Management System.
Our more technical articles describe how to create your own domain-specific language with a parser that gets invoked when you run import on a file with an extension of your own choosing, and how to create a protocol simulation framework that lets you experiment with how packets will traverse a network. And Mark Mruss offers another Welcome to Python article that this time covers Python dictionaries, whose usefulness and elegant design were certainly a big part of my own adoption of the language.
Finally, Steve Holden shares his perspective as head of the Python Software Foundation, this time reflecting on the wonderful success of PyCon 2009 last month.

I hope you'll take a look at this month's issue, and I hope that you learn as much from reading it as I myself learned from the process of editing. Enjoy!