CrazyTB's blog

The original keynote
In case you don't know him, Bruce Eckel is very famous for his books Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++. He was also a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ standard committee [1].

In march of 2001, the 9th Annual International Python Conference was held in Long Beach, California. Bruce Eckel was there, and presented the keynote "Why I love Python". Let me emphasize this: the guy who wrote thick and respectable books about C++ and Java was doing a keynote explaining why he loves Python.

If you missed that keynote, don't worry. I missed it too. Actually, I think that by 2001 I didn't even know Python existed.

In middle-2003, Bill Venners had an interview with Bruce Eckel about his "Why I love Python" keynote. In this interview (published during the period of about two months), Bruce Eckel explained each of his top ten reasons to love Python. If you (like me) missed the keynote itself, you can imagine that this interview is a text-only version of his talk, as the interview follows the keynote slides very well.

The slides from "Why I love Python" keynote are available for download at his own website, or you can watch them online at SlideShare.

I've compiled here a list of links for each page of the interview. Once reading the interview, you can click on the Next link at each page to go to the next one.

• Introduction
  
• 10. Reduced Clutter
  
• 9. It’s not backward-compatible in exchange for pain
  
• 8. It doesn’t value performance over my productivity
  
• 7. It doesn’t treat me like I’m stupid
  
• 6. I don’t wait forever for a full implementation of the language
  
• 5. It doesn’t make assumptions about how we discover errors
  
• Errors discovered with real data seem to me to be the hardest to find
  
• 4. Marketing people are not involved
  
• 3. I don’t have to type so much
  
• 2. My guesses are usually right
  
• 1. Python lets me focus on concepts
  
• Python and “The Tipping Point”
  
• Productivity versus Performance
  

The new, updated keynote
On 2008-09-18, Bruce Eckel came to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to give us a keynote at PyConBrasil 2008. The keynote was still called "Why I love Python", but the slides have been updated a lot, even though the main reasons are still the same. He quickly talked about PyConBrasil 2008 at his blog.

This time, I already knew Python and I wouldn't miss his talk! Of course, having PyConBrasil at the exact city where I live helped a lot too.

The updated "Why I Love Python" slides are available from SlideShare. All PyConBrasil 2008 talks were recorded on video and are available at Google Video. Thus, you can watch Bruce Eckel's updated "Why I Love Python" keynote.

Just a note: although I agree with most things Bruce Eckel said, I disagree that the requirement to declare self is a con. I like that and I think it is a nice feature.




(bonus) Extra content from PyConBrasil 2008
There is also the The World is Dynamic (Burning Man) talk that Bruce Eckel gave us at the end of the day (as he mentioned in his blog).

Other presentations (in Portuguese) from PyConBrasil were added under pyconbrasil2008 tag at SlideShare. There are also other video recordings at Google Video.