WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:03.140 Grab your micro framework and pour some web into your flask. 00:00:03.140 --> 00:00:08.200 It's time for Talk Python To Me, episode number 13 with guest Armin Roenacker. 00:00:08.200 --> 00:00:11.980 Recorded Monday, May 29th, 2015. 00:00:11.980 --> 00:00:40.760 Hello and welcome to Talk Python To Me, 00:00:40.760 --> 00:00:46.280 a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities. 00:00:46.280 --> 00:00:48.380 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:00:48.380 --> 00:00:55.680 Follow me on Twitter where I'm @mkennedy and keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpythontome.com. 00:00:55.680 --> 00:01:02.580 This episode, we'll be talking to Armin Roenacker about Flask, Python, the web, and Rust. 00:01:02.580 --> 00:01:07.380 I'm really fortunate to have CodeChip and Hired sponsoring the show. 00:01:07.380 --> 00:01:09.780 Let me take just a few seconds to tell you about them. 00:01:09.780 --> 00:01:15.440 CodeChip is a platform for continuous integration and continuous delivery as a service. 00:01:15.440 --> 00:01:18.080 They encourage you to always keep shipping. 00:01:18.900 --> 00:01:23.820 Please take a moment and check them out at codeship.com or follow them on Twitter where they're at codeship. 00:01:23.820 --> 00:01:26.800 Hired wants to help you find your dream job. 00:01:26.800 --> 00:01:30.420 Hired is built specifically for developers looking for new opportunities. 00:01:30.420 --> 00:01:35.540 Check them out and get a very special offer at hired.com slash talkpythontome. 00:01:35.740 --> 00:01:39.620 And you'll find them on Twitter where they're at hired underscore HQ. 00:01:39.620 --> 00:01:41.920 Now for a few announcements. 00:01:42.400 --> 00:01:45.260 First, the Talk Python To Me t-shirt is here. 00:01:45.260 --> 00:01:49.780 I talked about the possibility of a Talk Python To Me t-shirt a few shows back. 00:01:49.780 --> 00:01:53.040 Well, there were enough requests to make this a reality. 00:01:53.040 --> 00:01:58.780 And today, I'm happy to tell you that a pretty sweet shirt awaits you at bit.ly slash python shirt. 00:01:59.180 --> 00:02:08.680 It's a Kickstarter project, but because you guys are so awesome, the Kickstarter was funded within three hours of my announcing it on Twitter and before I could even properly announce it on the air. 00:02:09.260 --> 00:02:11.960 So if you visit the Kickstarter, you'll find there's three tiers. 00:02:11.960 --> 00:02:13.400 One is the shirt, of course. 00:02:13.400 --> 00:02:16.920 But there are other options that get you a promotional spot on the show. 00:02:16.920 --> 00:02:21.680 So if you have a product, website, or company you want to get the word out about, here's your chance. 00:02:21.680 --> 00:02:27.280 Also, before we get to the interview, there's a few additional guests that made a cameo appearance in the show. 00:02:27.280 --> 00:02:29.100 I'll let them introduce themselves. 00:02:37.100 --> 00:02:39.820 Seriously, there is a horse and some birds in this episode. 00:02:39.820 --> 00:02:49.880 Didn't mean for that to happen, but with the crazy time zones between Germany and the U.S. West Coast, we recorded this episode somewhat out in nature in the evening for Armin. 00:02:49.880 --> 00:02:51.740 I hope you don't mind the extra guests. 00:02:51.740 --> 00:02:53.640 Now let's get on to a great show. 00:02:53.640 --> 00:02:56.120 Armin, welcome to the show. 00:02:56.120 --> 00:02:56.620 Hello. 00:02:56.620 --> 00:02:58.640 Thank you so much for being on my show. 00:02:58.640 --> 00:03:04.940 I'm a big fan of Flask, and I think it's one of the most used web frameworks out there in the Python space. 00:03:04.940 --> 00:03:07.380 And I'm really excited to talk to you about it today. 00:03:07.380 --> 00:03:08.780 Yeah, sounds good. 00:03:08.780 --> 00:03:10.520 I'm always glad to share. 00:03:10.520 --> 00:03:11.580 Yeah, great. 00:03:11.580 --> 00:03:15.940 And we'll talk a lot about the details of Flask and some of the other projects you're working on. 00:03:15.940 --> 00:03:19.780 But before we get to them, you know, people are always wondering, you know, 00:03:19.780 --> 00:03:24.840 everyone who's really accomplished a lot in their programming career like you have, you know, how did you get started? 00:03:24.840 --> 00:03:26.260 Where do you start programming? 00:03:26.260 --> 00:03:28.400 How do you get inspired to do this kind of stuff? 00:03:28.940 --> 00:03:33.260 I think for me, it didn't really start anywhere. 00:03:33.260 --> 00:03:36.820 It just gradually became more and more. 00:03:36.820 --> 00:03:40.180 So I just had an interest in technology and programming. 00:03:41.660 --> 00:03:47.820 And I just quite early on figured out that they're computers and you can do stuff with them. 00:03:47.820 --> 00:03:49.740 And then it just grew. 00:03:49.740 --> 00:03:53.180 So it's actually very hard for me to figure out where exactly I started in Python. 00:03:53.180 --> 00:04:02.260 It definitely wasn't the first programming language I used, but it was one of the earliest ones I used in a proper way. 00:04:02.260 --> 00:04:02.860 Sure. 00:04:02.860 --> 00:04:04.940 Do you remember what you started with before Python? 00:04:05.840 --> 00:04:08.580 Oh, I know that the first thing I ever used was Quick Basic. 00:04:08.580 --> 00:04:10.160 That's what I found. 00:04:10.160 --> 00:04:15.640 Quick Basic was the one with the line numbers, right? 00:04:15.640 --> 00:04:16.260 Like 10. 00:04:16.260 --> 00:04:17.160 No, no, no. 00:04:17.160 --> 00:04:17.600 It didn't even. 00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:18.180 No, no. 00:04:18.180 --> 00:04:19.920 It had proper structures. 00:04:19.920 --> 00:04:20.540 Did it? 00:04:20.540 --> 00:04:20.740 Okay. 00:04:20.740 --> 00:04:21.820 You have functions and everything. 00:04:21.820 --> 00:04:26.500 Although I did use GoTo, but to go to label and not go to line number. 00:04:26.500 --> 00:04:27.740 It was actually quite good. 00:04:27.740 --> 00:04:28.380 Yeah, yeah. 00:04:28.380 --> 00:04:28.800 That's good. 00:04:28.800 --> 00:04:31.740 And then I found Pascal. 00:04:32.260 --> 00:04:37.780 And there was a version you can run on Windows, which is called Delphi or Delphi. 00:04:37.780 --> 00:04:38.860 And I used that. 00:04:38.860 --> 00:04:40.200 And then I found Python. 00:04:40.200 --> 00:04:42.580 And that just... 00:04:42.580 --> 00:04:44.060 It's not even true. 00:04:44.060 --> 00:04:45.440 I used PHP before. 00:04:45.440 --> 00:04:50.540 That's how I got into web development was that I found Python and PHP sort of at the same time. 00:04:51.560 --> 00:04:54.280 And I tried to make Python more into PHP. 00:04:54.280 --> 00:04:58.380 Because when I started using Python originally, there was... 00:04:58.380 --> 00:05:04.460 So when I started using Python originally for web development, Django didn't exist yet. 00:05:04.460 --> 00:05:07.380 It kind of was starting to... 00:05:07.380 --> 00:05:09.600 So there was a Python talk, a Python talk, I think. 00:05:09.600 --> 00:05:12.680 And then it came out in 2005 or something. 00:05:13.960 --> 00:05:15.240 And I was... 00:05:15.240 --> 00:05:22.160 At the time, I was trying to make just web applications with just CGI and stuff like that. 00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:22.740 Right. 00:05:22.740 --> 00:05:26.380 And then that's how I figured out that WSGI is a thing. 00:05:26.380 --> 00:05:29.200 It was just drafted up as a PEP at that point. 00:05:29.200 --> 00:05:31.940 And then I just got interested in how it works. 00:05:31.940 --> 00:05:35.600 And that's how I ended up doing Python properly, I guess. 00:05:35.600 --> 00:05:36.760 Yeah, that's cool. 00:05:36.760 --> 00:05:39.500 So what do you do today for work? 00:05:39.500 --> 00:05:40.960 That's complicated. 00:05:42.740 --> 00:05:48.660 So for the last three years, I have worked at a gaming company in London. 00:05:48.660 --> 00:05:51.100 And there was a lot of Python, obviously. 00:05:51.100 --> 00:05:53.140 Because we're doing... 00:05:53.140 --> 00:05:55.400 That's what I do professionally, obviously. 00:05:55.400 --> 00:06:00.140 But a lot of the stuff we did there was very game-related. 00:06:00.140 --> 00:06:06.640 So we built server infrastructure for computer games with Python and just general databases. 00:06:06.640 --> 00:06:12.060 But then also quite a lot of stuff on the game side itself. 00:06:12.520 --> 00:06:24.280 So the last project I worked on before the stuff I'm doing currently was helping out with the Halo Master Chief Collection. 00:06:24.280 --> 00:06:26.580 And that was mostly client-side. 00:06:26.580 --> 00:06:28.520 So it was more C++ than Python. 00:06:28.520 --> 00:06:29.220 Yeah. 00:06:29.220 --> 00:06:31.700 On the client-side, when you're doing games, there's a lot of C++. 00:06:31.700 --> 00:06:34.060 Did it have an online component, a web component? 00:06:35.120 --> 00:06:38.160 Yeah, there's lots of web stuff nowadays in these computer games. 00:06:38.160 --> 00:06:40.020 Like, everything is in the cloud. 00:06:40.020 --> 00:06:42.040 So there's lots of HTTP and everything. 00:06:43.540 --> 00:06:52.880 And now, with sort of the beginning of the year, I'm doing both the computer-side thing, computer-game-side thing still. 00:06:52.880 --> 00:06:58.640 But also working on Sentry now, which is an online error-reporting tool. 00:06:58.640 --> 00:07:00.700 Excellent. 00:07:00.700 --> 00:07:01.440 That sounds... 00:07:01.440 --> 00:07:01.580 Yeah. 00:07:01.580 --> 00:07:02.020 Yeah. 00:07:02.180 --> 00:07:03.480 I think you might have seen that. 00:07:03.480 --> 00:07:05.760 It is a Django project. 00:07:05.760 --> 00:07:08.480 And it's quite popular in the Python community. 00:07:08.480 --> 00:07:09.240 Yeah, yeah. 00:07:09.240 --> 00:07:11.300 So that's why I spend some of my time on now. 00:07:11.300 --> 00:07:12.320 Yeah, it's really great. 00:07:12.320 --> 00:07:14.960 We'll put links to those in the show notes. 00:07:15.280 --> 00:07:16.900 Can you say the name of the game that you're working on? 00:07:16.900 --> 00:07:21.300 So the last game I was working on was Halo the Master Chief Collection. 00:07:21.300 --> 00:07:22.980 And I can't say what I'm doing currently. 00:07:22.980 --> 00:07:23.860 Yeah, okay. 00:07:23.860 --> 00:07:24.260 Great. 00:07:24.260 --> 00:07:26.200 Sounds like a lot of fun, though. 00:07:26.200 --> 00:07:31.820 So the thing that I sort of know you for out in the community is Flask. 00:07:31.820 --> 00:07:33.040 What is Flask? 00:07:33.040 --> 00:07:34.380 And how do you get started with that? 00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:44.080 So Flask in itself is the end result of just taking a bunch of stuff that I built before 00:07:44.080 --> 00:07:47.300 and make it into a proper framework. 00:07:47.300 --> 00:07:52.760 So Flask in itself can be used for building sort of any web application you want to do. 00:07:52.760 --> 00:07:56.400 It's sort of the base building block you can put the application on top. 00:07:56.400 --> 00:07:59.420 But Flask is not the... 00:07:59.420 --> 00:08:04.340 When Flask came out originally, it was pretty much empty 00:08:04.340 --> 00:08:08.680 because it's sitting on top of two or more than two. 00:08:08.680 --> 00:08:09.980 I think it's like three base libraries. 00:08:09.980 --> 00:08:14.760 It's Werkzeug, which is a WGRI implementation, 00:08:14.760 --> 00:08:20.040 which does the HTTP handling so that you can get your form data parsed. 00:08:20.040 --> 00:08:22.280 You can get access to your cookies and all that sort of stuff. 00:08:22.280 --> 00:08:25.180 And then Jinja, which is a templating engine, 00:08:25.180 --> 00:08:30.480 which originally started out as an evolution of the Django templating engine. 00:08:31.640 --> 00:08:35.480 And then it's sitting on top of markup safe and it's dangerous. 00:08:35.480 --> 00:08:40.640 These are two libraries which are dealing with security-related things 00:08:40.640 --> 00:08:47.580 just to keep HTML safe and to sign your cookies to keep them safe from tampering with. 00:08:47.580 --> 00:08:50.700 And that's what Flask is. 00:08:50.980 --> 00:08:52.900 So it's basically a combination. 00:08:52.900 --> 00:09:01.280 It configures three base libraries I wrote before into a coherent package you can get started with. 00:09:01.280 --> 00:09:02.460 All right. 00:09:02.460 --> 00:09:03.040 That's really cool. 00:09:03.040 --> 00:09:06.940 What were you using before Flask that kind of inspired you to create this framework? 00:09:06.940 --> 00:09:08.840 Was that Django or something else? 00:09:09.460 --> 00:09:14.160 So I was always using my own libraries, which was Werkzeug, Jinja, It's Dangerous. 00:09:14.160 --> 00:09:15.600 Basically, What's Sitting... 00:09:15.600 --> 00:09:19.120 It's Dangerous came afterwards, but there was an implementation of that before. 00:09:19.120 --> 00:09:24.300 So these were always these libraries which I wrote before, which I was using, 00:09:24.300 --> 00:09:26.040 but they were never really all that popular. 00:09:26.040 --> 00:09:30.600 And then people started doing this one-file micro-frameworks, 00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:33.800 and I started doing an April's full stroke, 00:09:33.800 --> 00:09:36.760 where I basically took all the libraries I had and put them into a zip file, 00:09:36.760 --> 00:09:39.400 Bay64 encoded them into a Python file, 00:09:39.400 --> 00:09:43.480 and then I distributed one Python file, which included all my libraries. 00:09:43.480 --> 00:09:44.240 Oh, nice. 00:09:44.240 --> 00:09:48.100 And I made an April's full stroke with screencast and everything about it. 00:09:48.100 --> 00:09:52.300 And what I learned there is that that actually got really popular, 00:09:52.300 --> 00:09:56.160 and it didn't actually get popular because people realized it was an April's full stroke. 00:09:56.160 --> 00:10:00.060 It got popular because there was a little bit of marketing behind it. 00:10:00.060 --> 00:10:05.920 So I took that sort of lesson and applied it to making a wrapper around my libraries, 00:10:05.920 --> 00:10:10.820 which I called Flask, and I wrote good documentation for it, made a website, 00:10:10.820 --> 00:10:18.960 and I just promoted it a little bit, just at conferences and just shared it with people. 00:10:18.960 --> 00:10:22.940 And that then got a lot more popular than the libraries themselves were. 00:10:22.940 --> 00:10:25.080 So that's how Flask actually happened. 00:10:25.280 --> 00:10:32.020 It was more sort of the first push to try to make it into something that people would actually use, 00:10:32.020 --> 00:10:32.620 and not just me. 00:10:32.620 --> 00:10:34.180 So you have these little separate libraries. 00:10:34.180 --> 00:10:38.300 They were all useful, but it was the putting them together as like a coherent whole 00:10:38.300 --> 00:10:40.640 that kind of made it really interesting in the community. 00:10:40.640 --> 00:10:42.540 Yeah, I think so. 00:10:42.540 --> 00:10:46.380 I mean, there's still probably more people that use the base libraries than actually use Flask, 00:10:46.380 --> 00:10:50.960 but Flask is the one thing that you can easily find now. 00:10:51.680 --> 00:10:52.320 Yeah, for sure. 00:10:52.320 --> 00:10:53.520 And it's very popular. 00:10:53.520 --> 00:10:57.540 You know, on GitHub, you've got over 14,000 stars, over 4,000 forks. 00:10:57.540 --> 00:10:59.120 You must be pretty proud of it. 00:10:59.120 --> 00:11:02.120 Yeah, it's pretty cool that it took off this way. 00:11:02.120 --> 00:11:03.040 Yeah. 00:11:03.040 --> 00:11:03.900 Nice. 00:11:03.900 --> 00:11:05.220 When did you release it originally? 00:11:05.220 --> 00:11:07.760 Ah, I don't know anymore. 00:11:07.760 --> 00:11:12.860 I know that it was a couple of, I think it might have been like two or three months. 00:11:12.860 --> 00:11:16.960 No, even probably less than a month even after it was full stroke. 00:11:17.100 --> 00:11:20.500 That was probably, I don't know, six years ago now? 00:11:20.500 --> 00:11:21.280 Yeah. 00:11:21.280 --> 00:11:22.260 I can't remember. 00:11:22.260 --> 00:11:23.720 It would actually be interesting. 00:11:23.720 --> 00:11:26.880 Oh, it's not even one pounder. 00:11:26.880 --> 00:11:29.540 Yeah, you've got to celebrate his birthday or something like that, right? 00:11:29.540 --> 00:11:35.220 Yeah, I'm not that attached to actually celebrating things. 00:11:35.220 --> 00:11:36.180 Sure. 00:11:36.180 --> 00:11:38.100 So one thing that... 00:11:38.100 --> 00:11:38.740 2010. 00:11:38.740 --> 00:11:40.140 So that sounds at all. 00:11:40.140 --> 00:11:40.960 Yeah, okay. 00:11:40.960 --> 00:11:42.520 So it's five years. 00:11:42.520 --> 00:11:43.520 Almost five years. 00:11:43.520 --> 00:11:44.480 Exactly, right? 00:11:44.480 --> 00:11:45.800 Because it's a... 00:11:45.800 --> 00:11:47.760 Yeah, made it for 12. 00:11:47.760 --> 00:11:48.300 Yeah. 00:11:48.300 --> 00:11:49.380 Great. 00:11:49.380 --> 00:11:51.020 Okay, so perfect. 00:11:51.020 --> 00:11:51.460 Five years. 00:11:51.460 --> 00:11:51.460 Five years. 00:12:05.160 --> 00:12:10.780 CodeChip is a hosted, continuous delivery service focused on speed, security, and customizability. 00:12:10.780 --> 00:12:16.600 You can set up continuous integration in a matter of seconds and automatically deploy when your tests have passed. 00:12:16.600 --> 00:12:19.840 CodeChip supports your GitHub and Bitbucket projects. 00:12:19.840 --> 00:12:22.620 You can get started with CodeChip's free plan today. 00:12:22.620 --> 00:12:31.100 Should you decide to go with a premium plan, Talk Python listeners can save 20% off any plan for the next three months by using the code TALKPython. 00:12:31.100 --> 00:12:32.840 All caps, no spaces. 00:12:33.440 --> 00:12:40.180 Check them out at CodeChip.com and tell them thanks for sponsoring the show on Twitter where they're at CodeChip. 00:12:40.180 --> 00:12:52.740 One thing I thought would be interesting for people, even though it's a little hard to do, is maybe just describe a little bit of the type of code that you have to write. 00:12:52.740 --> 00:12:57.220 I suspect many people out there have written Flask apps, but also many of them haven't. 00:12:57.220 --> 00:12:58.460 So, like, how do I get started? 00:12:59.080 --> 00:13:05.900 So, I guess the easiest way to get started with it is to download it from pip, which is what most people use now. 00:13:05.900 --> 00:13:15.740 Set up a virtual env, get pip, install Flask in there, and then you can probably even just go to the front page of Flask and copy-paste the Hello World example. 00:13:15.740 --> 00:13:19.700 And that's probably good enough to get going, which is really not that much. 00:13:19.700 --> 00:13:20.680 It's like four lines of code. 00:13:20.820 --> 00:13:28.420 So, it's quite straightforward, and it comes, like most Python frameworks, with a local development server and pretty much all the stuff you need. 00:13:28.640 --> 00:13:37.480 You basically create an instance of the Flask class, you give it a name, and you call run on it, and you map some routes to some methods and things like that, right? 00:13:37.480 --> 00:13:38.380 Yeah. 00:13:38.520 --> 00:13:49.220 So, I think one of the things I wanted to do with Flask was to show people what's a better idea to structure an application compared to how you do it in Django, for instance. 00:13:49.220 --> 00:13:55.000 Because if you have used Django, Django has this huge config problem. 00:13:55.000 --> 00:13:59.080 Where they have this module, it's called Django Conf Settings. 00:13:59.380 --> 00:14:10.080 And it's one global object which holds all your configuration, which basically means that in one Python process, you can only run one application, because they would touch each other's config settings. 00:14:10.080 --> 00:14:17.180 So, with Flask, I wanted to show that you can do it differently as well, where in Flask, you have to create an instance of Flask. 00:14:17.180 --> 00:14:21.180 And you can create multiple instances, and they can be living entirely separate of each other. 00:14:22.540 --> 00:14:28.040 So, that's why you have to create this Flask object, because you configure that Flask object. 00:14:28.040 --> 00:14:32.320 And it's actually really nice, the effect to get out of this. 00:14:32.320 --> 00:14:35.420 I mean, Flask is obviously not the first framework that does that. 00:14:35.420 --> 00:14:37.780 I mean, that's a general really good pattern for development. 00:14:37.780 --> 00:14:44.800 But I think it was definitely one of the frameworks that popularized this idea of creating an application object, 00:14:45.320 --> 00:14:55.620 and then configuring that application object instead of just changing some configuration, which is entirely detached from what you're doing somewhere else in the Python process. 00:14:55.620 --> 00:14:58.980 Yeah, I really like that way that you're doing that as well. 00:14:58.980 --> 00:15:01.640 And does it help with testing and things like that? 00:15:01.640 --> 00:15:02.880 Yeah, definitely. 00:15:02.880 --> 00:15:06.280 Especially the test for Flask itself. 00:15:06.520 --> 00:15:15.860 I mean, they create like 500 different individual Flask applications and test them, which is a lot nicer to work with than trying to do test separation on Django, 00:15:15.860 --> 00:15:23.200 where you're never quite sure if the last test run actually reset everything to the state you thought it should be. 00:15:23.200 --> 00:15:29.400 So, it's very nice that you can actually create those applications and guarantee that they will be separate of each other. 00:15:29.400 --> 00:15:29.900 Sure. 00:15:29.900 --> 00:15:36.160 So, you just don't know if there's some sort of order dependency in your Django test, because it's really the same one, right? 00:15:36.420 --> 00:15:36.600 Mm-hmm. 00:15:36.600 --> 00:15:38.160 Okay, that's really cool. 00:15:38.160 --> 00:15:39.620 You've been talking about Django. 00:15:39.620 --> 00:15:46.340 There's some other web frameworks that come to mind as well, like Pyramid is probably the other major one that comes to mind for me. 00:15:46.340 --> 00:15:50.300 Can you sort of compare and contrast what it's like working in those different environments? 00:15:50.300 --> 00:15:54.600 Like, what is special about Flask over, say, Django or Pyramid? 00:15:54.600 --> 00:15:56.480 I don't know. 00:15:56.480 --> 00:15:59.480 It's very hard for me to say now, because I have been using... 00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:13.560 Like, originally, when I started doing Flask, or even before that, when I just wrote the base libraries, there was a really, like, an almost war going on between the different frameworks and the popularity between them. 00:16:13.780 --> 00:16:20.280 And a lot of that had to do with that Whiskey as a standard was not very well established at that point. 00:16:20.280 --> 00:16:27.240 For instance, a lot of developers deployed the Django applications with ModPython. 00:16:27.240 --> 00:16:37.120 And even if they did use ModWhiskey to deploy them or just any other WSGI server, there was no real way to interact with Whiskey in Django. 00:16:37.120 --> 00:16:39.300 So you couldn't add any Whiskey middlewares. 00:16:39.300 --> 00:16:40.080 There was... 00:16:40.080 --> 00:16:45.420 Basically, people wrote their libraries very, very specific to frameworks. 00:16:45.420 --> 00:16:55.820 Flask Stephanie was a framework that did it differently, because it promoted the idea of you actually write library against no framework at all. 00:16:55.820 --> 00:17:01.780 You just try to write your library in a way that makes it work in an isolated way. 00:17:01.780 --> 00:17:09.920 And then later on, you make an extension, and then you bind your library as conveniently as possible for the framework you want to use it with. 00:17:09.920 --> 00:17:11.780 And I think that is... 00:17:11.780 --> 00:17:22.720 Flask was probably not the first one which did it, but I think that is a much better situation to be in now, because many libraries do not require to be in the context of a specific framework. 00:17:23.100 --> 00:17:33.320 So at this point, I think it's very irrelevant which framework you actually use, because you can use pretty much all the functionality in the Python ecosystem in any of those frameworks. 00:17:33.320 --> 00:17:45.260 There might be small differences in how it works, but it's definitely very different than how it was in 2007 or 2008, when some functionality only existed within Django, for instance. 00:17:45.260 --> 00:17:48.660 Or you had to use TurboGear or something of that sort. 00:17:48.660 --> 00:17:51.220 So I think that is different now. 00:17:51.220 --> 00:18:03.600 And at this point, the framework is such a small part of your overall development experience that whatever floats your boat, I guess, is a good way to get started. 00:18:03.600 --> 00:18:09.920 And then after some period of time, you probably will end up modifying the framework you're using anyways. 00:18:10.520 --> 00:18:11.220 So, yeah. 00:18:11.220 --> 00:18:15.820 I don't know if that answers the question about comparing those frameworks. 00:18:15.820 --> 00:18:17.980 No, but it's an interesting answer for sure. 00:18:17.980 --> 00:18:19.620 I think it does somewhat answer it. 00:18:19.620 --> 00:18:27.660 But, I mean, it's interesting to say that for the most part, it's not as front and center as it used to be. 00:18:28.020 --> 00:18:29.740 Yeah, I don't think it's front and center at all. 00:18:29.740 --> 00:18:35.520 Especially both Flask and Pyramid have the same general idea of... 00:18:35.520 --> 00:18:36.600 I mean, Pyramid is very different. 00:18:36.600 --> 00:18:42.420 But both of those systems have the idea that it's sort of a layered cake. 00:18:42.420 --> 00:18:44.480 And at the very bottom, you have Whiskey. 00:18:44.480 --> 00:18:50.380 And then one layer above that, you have a base implementation of Whiskey, which in case of Flask is Werkzeug. 00:18:50.380 --> 00:18:52.440 And in case of Pyramid is WebOp. 00:18:53.520 --> 00:19:01.000 And you can sort of reach through and then slice away every single layer you don't want to use and dig a little bit deeper. 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:07.060 Django doesn't do it just as much because of its long history of re-implementing everything for itself. 00:19:07.060 --> 00:19:16.920 But even if you can't use a certain functionality in Django, you can still go and use Flask together with Django if you would need to do that. 00:19:17.920 --> 00:19:25.980 And so in that sense, I think it's a lot less important now to pick a framework as it is or as it was before. 00:19:25.980 --> 00:19:27.360 Right. Okay, cool. 00:19:27.360 --> 00:19:31.080 So you said you created this in 2010. 00:19:31.080 --> 00:19:37.680 The way people write web apps today is fairly different than the way it was in 2010 and certainly before then. 00:19:37.680 --> 00:19:39.820 What's your thoughts on that? 00:19:40.220 --> 00:19:40.780 Yeah. 00:19:40.780 --> 00:19:48.140 So I think that Flask doesn't actually do a really good way in staying on top of things in that sense. 00:19:48.140 --> 00:19:56.120 So obviously, now there's a lot more JavaScript, for instance, in web development. 00:19:56.120 --> 00:20:00.980 And the idea of rendering something on the server is now almost like a holy war. 00:20:00.980 --> 00:20:01.880 Like, should you do it? 00:20:01.880 --> 00:20:04.260 Should you make React everything? 00:20:04.260 --> 00:20:05.080 Should you use Angular? 00:20:05.260 --> 00:20:05.640 I don't know. 00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:15.340 So especially in that environment, there is so much change happening currently that I'm sort of on the side a little bit of just seeing what happens. 00:20:15.340 --> 00:20:25.680 I made two terrible technology choices in the last three years by trying to use Angular, which then turned out to just not make sense in the way I was using it. 00:20:25.680 --> 00:20:28.620 Or maybe not even in the sense how Angular 1 was implemented. 00:20:30.440 --> 00:20:32.440 And then I don't even know what the other thing was. 00:20:32.440 --> 00:20:33.980 Maybe it was Backbone. 00:20:33.980 --> 00:20:34.660 I can't remember. 00:20:34.660 --> 00:20:47.500 But basically, the JavaScript world is moving so very fast in trying to change the whole infrastructure that right now it's actually really hard to make a good decision in regards to how you should build it. 00:20:47.500 --> 00:21:01.740 It's actually very good to be a little bit more conservative and try to pick something which hasn't been, is not entirely the latest thing that's happening because you just run at risk of that thing changing so quickly while you need to use it. 00:21:01.740 --> 00:21:12.420 But I do think that there's a, so generally, like, the way I use my own software at my work is very different than how most people use Flask. 00:21:13.120 --> 00:21:28.780 Because, for instance, at Fireteam, which is the London-based gaming company I work for, we basically build infrastructure by, when we have front-end UIs, they sit on top of an API server, which then talks to a remote API server. 00:21:28.780 --> 00:21:32.800 So it's a very layered situation you have there. 00:21:32.800 --> 00:21:39.500 And that is getting more and more common, that you basically build services out of plugging individual APIs together. 00:21:39.500 --> 00:21:43.440 I wouldn't necessarily call it service-oriented architecture, but it does kind of go that way. 00:21:43.440 --> 00:21:47.600 And that is definitely getting more popular. 00:21:47.600 --> 00:21:55.700 And I think that is probably an area where Flask will develop into the moment it becomes clear that this is something that makes sense. 00:21:55.700 --> 00:21:57.940 But you can already do that today. 00:21:57.940 --> 00:22:11.700 There's so much stuff that you can plug into Flask that will support you in writing APIs and then putting front-end UIs on top of that, instead of actually going and just delivering HTML to the client directly. 00:22:11.700 --> 00:22:21.720 Yeah, I think one of the things that really impresses me about Flask is all the stuff that people are layering on top of Flask to write really cool applications. 00:22:22.600 --> 00:22:31.520 Yeah, I think it's a good thing that Flask itself, it did grow in size, but it's still very, very small and tiny. 00:22:31.520 --> 00:22:36.360 And there's a lot more that actually exists in the ecosystem that doesn't exist in Flask itself. 00:22:36.360 --> 00:22:37.480 Right. 00:22:37.480 --> 00:22:41.920 One of the ones I was thinking of is this thing called Eve by a guy named Nicola Hiroshi. 00:22:41.920 --> 00:22:43.940 He was one of our first guests, actually. 00:22:44.200 --> 00:22:49.740 And that's like a REST API on top of Mongo and SQLAlchemy and so on that has Flask as the base. 00:22:49.740 --> 00:22:58.040 What else is out there like that that I can add in and maybe create a RESTful system or whatever else that you've seen that's pretty cool? 00:23:08.040 --> 00:23:10.860 This episode is brought to you by Hired. 00:23:10.860 --> 00:23:17.320 Hired is a two-sided, curated marketplace that connects the world's knowledge workers to the best opportunities. 00:23:17.320 --> 00:23:26.480 Each offer you receive has salary and equity presented right up front and you can view the offers to accept or reject them before you even talk to the company. 00:23:26.480 --> 00:23:32.840 Typically, candidates receive five or more offers in just the first week and there are no obligations ever. 00:23:32.840 --> 00:23:34.940 Sounds pretty awesome, doesn't it? 00:23:34.940 --> 00:23:37.000 Well, did I mention there's a signing bonus? 00:23:37.320 --> 00:23:41.120 Everyone who accepts a job from Hired gets a $2,000 signing bonus. 00:23:41.120 --> 00:23:45.420 And as Talk Python listeners, it gets way sweeter. 00:23:45.420 --> 00:23:52.980 Use the link Hired.com slash Talk Python To Me and Hired will double the signing bonus to $4,000. 00:23:52.980 --> 00:23:54.700 Opportunity's knocking. 00:23:54.700 --> 00:23:58.320 Visit Hired.com slash Talk Python To Me and answer the call. 00:24:06.600 --> 00:24:10.500 So the thing is, I'm not using Flask extension myself much. 00:24:10.500 --> 00:24:11.740 I don't know. 00:24:11.740 --> 00:24:16.140 I like the idea of having as much control as possible over what I'm doing. 00:24:16.140 --> 00:24:21.140 And unless I'm not using it, I'm not using it. 00:24:21.140 --> 00:24:23.080 I'm probably not necessarily going to use it. 00:24:23.080 --> 00:24:30.760 So I use a ton of the database integrations like Flask and Quarkomy, obviously, because I'm a friend of Postgres. 00:24:30.760 --> 00:24:32.660 So that's sort of my database of choice. 00:24:32.660 --> 00:24:40.020 So these little extensions that just make it very easy to connect to a database, I use them pretty much all. 00:24:40.740 --> 00:24:54.820 There is the Flask security, which gets you quite far in just setting up an authentication layer and getting the most problematic security problems out of your way. 00:24:54.820 --> 00:24:56.720 What else am I using? 00:24:56.880 --> 00:25:00.240 I'm using Flask WTF just because it's good enough. 00:25:00.240 --> 00:25:09.840 It's maybe not the best extension in the world, but if you do have a simple problem where you do want to run down the server and you want to do form handling, that's a pretty good way to do it. 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:18.440 And there are a lot of extensions for building APIs, of which I am not going to name any of them because you can easily find them. 00:25:18.440 --> 00:25:25.200 I don't want to give one of them more the head of sort of an advantage over the others, which is name dropping them. 00:25:25.200 --> 00:25:29.520 Because I honestly have no idea which one of them is the one to pick. 00:25:29.520 --> 00:25:30.080 Right. 00:25:30.080 --> 00:25:30.560 Of course. 00:25:30.560 --> 00:25:38.620 When I go and I create one of these views, I basically take a method and I put a cool attribute on it like app.route. 00:25:38.620 --> 00:25:39.180 Is that it right? 00:25:39.180 --> 00:25:40.160 If I'm recalling correctly. 00:25:40.420 --> 00:25:40.540 Yeah. 00:25:40.540 --> 00:25:41.020 Yeah. 00:25:41.020 --> 00:25:42.500 I say app.route is the decorator. 00:25:42.500 --> 00:25:47.980 Then that just automatically chooses the URL template that I'm going to use, right? 00:25:47.980 --> 00:25:49.260 That's going to map to that method. 00:25:49.260 --> 00:25:52.000 Is there a way to do that with classes in a more general way? 00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:58.000 So I can say like map this sort of base URL to this class and then pick off the methods. 00:25:58.000 --> 00:25:58.540 Yeah. 00:25:58.540 --> 00:26:00.520 There's lots of stuff you can do that. 00:26:00.520 --> 00:26:05.160 I'm not a huge fan of using classes for that sort of stuff. 00:26:05.740 --> 00:26:15.520 So there's this class-based view thing where you can invoke different methods depending on what HTTP method, for instance, gets passed in. 00:26:15.760 --> 00:26:20.840 That's a thing that's a little bit more interesting than actually routing directly to methods based on a URL. 00:26:20.840 --> 00:26:26.640 I had not so good experience in the past with accidentally doing something you don't want to do. 00:26:27.360 --> 00:26:30.300 But I do think there are some packages that do that. 00:26:30.300 --> 00:26:45.260 But I think when it comes to this routing recursively into a class or a method in a class, there are probably systems out there for which this sort of routing behavior is a little bit more natural than it is for Flask. 00:26:45.660 --> 00:26:49.040 Flask has a very different philosophy for the URL mapping. 00:26:49.040 --> 00:27:02.520 The philosophy that originally went into the Vectsug URL system, what it's based on, is that a resource should be uniquely identified by the URL it maps to. 00:27:02.520 --> 00:27:04.500 Which you can actually see very... 00:27:04.500 --> 00:27:09.400 You can see this quite far in how the routing system behaves. 00:27:09.400 --> 00:27:20.780 For instance, if you go to a URL and the URL is declared with a slash in the end and you don't go to the URL with the slash, it will redirect before it even goes to matching to have the slash there. 00:27:20.780 --> 00:27:25.540 So it will enforce that the URL is unique if there are ambiguities. 00:27:26.960 --> 00:27:42.600 Even if you build a pagination system and you have slash, I don't know, slash wiki as the base part, and then you have slash wiki slash page slash one, that page slash one will redirect to slash wiki. 00:27:42.600 --> 00:27:49.060 So the routing system is based on the idea that everything has to be... there's only one URL for the resource. 00:27:49.060 --> 00:27:50.360 I really like that philosophy. 00:27:50.360 --> 00:27:51.280 That sounds great. 00:27:51.280 --> 00:27:53.700 I didn't realize it would actually disambiguate it for you. 00:27:53.700 --> 00:27:54.120 That's cool. 00:27:54.640 --> 00:28:01.860 Yeah, and that's why it's very hard to do generic URL routing with it where you have like, oh, and now I go to like a method. 00:28:01.860 --> 00:28:05.120 Because very often those systems, they have to be a little bit fuzzy. 00:28:05.120 --> 00:28:10.320 And the vector routing system is not entirely... like it's based on not being fuzzy, basically. 00:28:10.320 --> 00:28:14.540 So that part... that's why they are a little bit in a conflict with each other. 00:28:14.540 --> 00:28:19.000 But if you would want to build something like this on top of it, you could probably do it. 00:28:19.000 --> 00:28:23.540 But I would probably recommend looking more into Pyramid for that sort of thing. 00:28:23.540 --> 00:28:24.100 Sure. 00:28:24.380 --> 00:28:27.760 Because they have this sort of recursive routing system. 00:28:27.760 --> 00:28:28.660 Yeah, that makes sense. 00:28:28.660 --> 00:28:29.420 Okay, cool. 00:28:29.420 --> 00:28:35.820 So the last show that we just released on Tuesday, a couple days ago, was with Docker. 00:28:35.820 --> 00:28:38.240 Are you doing anything with Docker? 00:28:38.240 --> 00:28:41.940 Does Flask have any sort of special place with Docker? 00:28:41.940 --> 00:28:43.940 What's your thoughts there on how those go together? 00:28:43.940 --> 00:28:45.140 I love Docker. 00:28:45.140 --> 00:28:47.260 I think it's a cool thing. 00:28:47.600 --> 00:28:51.980 I don't like Docker in itself as much as I like the idea of containers. 00:28:51.980 --> 00:28:55.260 I think that's just an amazing thing. 00:28:55.260 --> 00:29:01.140 And it kind of shocks me that they haven't been more popular before because the concept is not entirely new. 00:29:02.620 --> 00:29:05.920 So it's great that that's taking off. 00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:07.240 And I don't know. 00:29:07.240 --> 00:29:13.460 I think this kind of sort of way of deploying applications this way is definitely going to be much more popular in the future. 00:29:14.600 --> 00:29:18.740 I think for Docker deployments, it's not really a framework problem. 00:29:18.740 --> 00:29:22.520 For Docker deployments, there's many other things that need solving. 00:29:22.520 --> 00:29:24.340 Like, where do I get my configuration? 00:29:24.340 --> 00:29:26.400 How do I make different services talk to each other? 00:29:26.400 --> 00:29:27.240 Right. 00:29:27.300 --> 00:29:28.860 How does this container talk to that container? 00:29:28.860 --> 00:29:29.700 Yeah. 00:29:29.700 --> 00:29:37.640 I don't know what the word for that is, but you have a lot of coordination between these different systems. 00:29:37.640 --> 00:29:40.800 And I think Flask will never gain that. 00:29:40.800 --> 00:29:44.400 That's just entirely out of its area. 00:29:44.400 --> 00:29:50.320 But maybe there will be systems that will support that in a way. 00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:51.000 Yeah. 00:29:51.000 --> 00:29:55.760 I definitely see Flask being more of one of the bricks that you use to build up that system. 00:29:55.760 --> 00:29:58.420 and not really involved in the connecting part. 00:29:58.420 --> 00:29:59.500 Yeah. 00:29:59.500 --> 00:30:02.100 I think this container part is going to be huge. 00:30:02.100 --> 00:30:08.300 But also, we are definitely going to build our applications fundamentally different when that becomes bigger. 00:30:08.300 --> 00:30:11.940 Many companies already do that anyways. 00:30:11.940 --> 00:30:15.300 It will just take some time until it trickles into the open source community. 00:30:15.300 --> 00:30:23.820 And we will start to pick up the ideas and lessons learned and build it into reusable systems. 00:30:23.820 --> 00:30:24.520 Absolutely. 00:30:24.520 --> 00:30:28.740 I think the whole deployment story in five years is going to look really different than it does today. 00:30:28.740 --> 00:30:29.960 Yeah, definitely. 00:30:29.960 --> 00:30:30.500 Yeah. 00:30:30.500 --> 00:30:31.220 Very cool. 00:30:31.220 --> 00:30:34.140 HTTP2 is coming along. 00:30:34.140 --> 00:30:36.240 What's the story of HTTP2 and Python? 00:30:36.240 --> 00:30:38.160 That's a good question. 00:30:38.160 --> 00:30:41.520 Like, you could theoretically use HTTP2 with Python. 00:30:41.520 --> 00:30:42.680 It would be perfectly fine. 00:30:43.480 --> 00:30:46.460 But you don't gain any of the benefits you have from that. 00:30:46.460 --> 00:30:53.300 And in order to actually use HTTP2 with Python or with an application efficiently, 00:30:53.300 --> 00:31:00.200 I think we will all have to actually sit down together as a community again and figure out how to extend the Whiskey protocol. 00:31:00.740 --> 00:31:02.340 So there are two ways we can go. 00:31:02.340 --> 00:31:18.780 Either one of them is nobody cares about WSGI anymore as a protocol and it's useless and it will just slowly die and we will bypass it and just figure out how to make frameworks talk directly HTTP, which might happen. 00:31:19.140 --> 00:31:27.280 HTTP2 as a protocol is complicated, but it's a little bit more lightweight in a way than HTTP is maybe. 00:31:28.360 --> 00:31:29.160 It's tricky. 00:31:29.160 --> 00:31:33.760 But basically the point is, Whiskey could die and we no longer care about it. 00:31:33.760 --> 00:31:38.740 Or we will have to evolve Whiskey to support what HTTP2 supports. 00:31:38.740 --> 00:31:50.020 Because one of the big features that you have as HTTP2 is that the server can decide to already deliver some content into the client's buffer before the client has to actually ask for it. 00:31:50.020 --> 00:31:58.780 So you could send your current page plus all the images plus all the statuses plus all the JavaScript in one go with the client having to do individual requests. 00:31:58.780 --> 00:32:04.480 And we don't have a good support for any of that stuff in Python so far. 00:32:04.480 --> 00:32:06.480 Right, exactly. 00:32:06.480 --> 00:32:09.240 Because those are going to different routes and it's basically coming in. 00:32:09.240 --> 00:32:11.980 Yeah, you have to restructure your application for that. 00:32:11.980 --> 00:32:16.900 It's very hard to just pretend that you don't have to have an understanding of that. 00:32:16.900 --> 00:32:23.540 You as an application writer have to inform the server about related resources. 00:32:23.540 --> 00:32:26.520 And there is no good way to magically do that. 00:32:26.520 --> 00:32:29.620 I mean, it could probably work, but yeah, we don't have that. 00:32:29.620 --> 00:32:33.600 And we might have to architect our applications a little bit different for that. 00:32:33.600 --> 00:32:42.220 There's a lot of promise there to reducing the number of actual server requests to load a page from something like 15 to 2 or something like that. 00:32:42.220 --> 00:32:42.940 That would be really nice. 00:32:42.940 --> 00:32:44.920 And we've got to make it possible, right? 00:32:44.920 --> 00:32:46.160 Okay, so very interesting. 00:32:46.160 --> 00:32:49.580 What's the future of Flask? 00:32:49.580 --> 00:32:53.420 Where are you putting your energy into when you're working on it now? 00:32:53.420 --> 00:32:59.720 I'm barely working on any of my open source libraries in the last two years, to be honest. 00:32:59.720 --> 00:33:02.900 I make sure that they release. 00:33:02.900 --> 00:33:06.960 I make sure that patches get merged at least to some degree. 00:33:07.300 --> 00:33:11.060 But there are many more people than me now which take care of those things. 00:33:11.060 --> 00:33:17.120 Yeah, looking on GitHub right now, you've got 268 registered contributors to Flask. 00:33:17.120 --> 00:33:19.280 So it's almost a management job, huh? 00:33:19.280 --> 00:33:24.060 Yeah, it becomes different than it was originally. 00:33:24.760 --> 00:33:30.440 For me, personally, what's in the future of Flask for me is that it becomes more stable. 00:33:30.440 --> 00:33:32.320 I don't want it to change too much. 00:33:33.500 --> 00:33:36.340 I learned this lesson in a way with Jinja. 00:33:36.340 --> 00:33:42.880 Jinja is a tablet engine which hasn't changed functionality-wise in a really long time. 00:33:42.880 --> 00:33:48.260 And I know there are flaws in there, and I know there are things I would do different nowadays. 00:33:48.960 --> 00:33:54.600 But I don't want to break anyone's stuff to fix some problems that I made. 00:33:54.600 --> 00:34:00.020 Because usually, it's not that you can fix a problem and it will make everyone's life easier. 00:34:00.020 --> 00:34:06.680 Usually, if you make a design this mistake, you have to change it in a way where you break people's stuff. 00:34:06.680 --> 00:34:09.860 And that makes nobody happy, especially if the problems are not big enough. 00:34:09.860 --> 00:34:16.940 Flask will not evolve in such big ways as Django as a framework is evolving. 00:34:17.060 --> 00:34:22.740 I think it's more likely that if I discover that I will no longer like developing this Flask, 00:34:22.740 --> 00:34:29.580 there will be a separate project which will solve the problem in a different way and become that. 00:34:29.580 --> 00:34:32.420 Flask doesn't really have to evolve in itself. 00:34:32.420 --> 00:34:37.320 I think it's not the worst spot right now. 00:34:37.320 --> 00:34:38.420 It needs new releases. 00:34:38.420 --> 00:34:40.540 It needs updates. 00:34:40.540 --> 00:34:44.020 But I don't think it has to fundamentally change to stay relevant. 00:34:44.220 --> 00:34:44.660 Sure. 00:34:44.660 --> 00:34:53.240 I think that that's probably partly attributable to the fact that you kept it small and didn't try to make everybody build on your APIs, but kind of pass through. 00:34:53.240 --> 00:34:55.740 Yeah, I think keeping it small is a good thing. 00:34:55.740 --> 00:34:59.220 I'm struggling right now to keep another library of mine small, which is Click. 00:34:59.220 --> 00:35:00.360 Yeah. 00:35:00.360 --> 00:35:02.280 Well, Click's cool. 00:35:02.280 --> 00:35:03.620 Can you tell people what Click is? 00:35:03.620 --> 00:35:09.260 Click is basically a micro framework for making commands and applications. 00:35:10.440 --> 00:35:12.700 It's based on similar ideas as Flask in a way. 00:35:12.700 --> 00:35:13.980 It's very composable. 00:35:13.980 --> 00:35:21.020 You make a Click application and you can attach another Click application to another Click application. 00:35:21.020 --> 00:35:28.780 You can basically build your whole whatever you used, art parse or opt parse or whatever else you had before for little command line scripts. 00:35:29.200 --> 00:35:35.080 You can use Click for that and then you can just scale them up to larger applications over time. 00:35:35.080 --> 00:35:41.720 So it's very often in the past I used to do this little script which just did one job and it was really terrible. 00:35:42.200 --> 00:35:53.020 And then if I wanted to make it nicer by adding a command line interface, I really hated the experience of adding yet another arc parse invocation for this. 00:35:53.020 --> 00:36:00.800 Or even things like DocOpt suffer a little bit from the same thing where it's just too much work to deal with the argument parsing properly. 00:36:01.840 --> 00:36:03.420 So this is where Click comes in handy. 00:36:03.420 --> 00:36:10.720 You basically make a Click application, attach a function to it and describe the parameters that go in. 00:36:10.720 --> 00:36:12.420 And then you have a little script. 00:36:12.420 --> 00:36:21.020 And then if you want to merge multiple of those scripts together, similar to how systems like Django Manage have like 20,000 subcommands. 00:36:21.020 --> 00:36:26.080 You could take all of those scripts and then merge them together into a larger application. 00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:28.020 And they will still continue working as they did before. 00:36:28.020 --> 00:36:31.020 It's a very composable way to build command line interfaces. 00:36:31.160 --> 00:36:32.080 That's really amazing. 00:36:32.080 --> 00:36:36.320 So it sounds like they'd be easier to maintain because they're not this great giant thing in the end. 00:36:36.320 --> 00:36:38.640 They're like little parts that are focused on one task. 00:36:38.640 --> 00:36:39.940 Yeah. 00:36:39.940 --> 00:36:43.660 And I think it's a lot more fun to keep them that way. 00:36:43.660 --> 00:36:47.560 What's the story with Python 3 and Flask? 00:36:47.560 --> 00:36:50.200 I don't know. 00:36:50.200 --> 00:36:54.040 The thing is, it runs on Python 3. 00:36:54.040 --> 00:36:56.040 That's as far as my support for it goes. 00:36:56.040 --> 00:36:58.480 I will try to keep it working on Python 3. 00:36:58.480 --> 00:37:00.460 I'm not using Python 3 myself. 00:37:00.480 --> 00:37:03.000 So that's basically it. 00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:06.540 If people would start using Python 3, then I will move over there as well. 00:37:06.540 --> 00:37:08.940 But since nobody else is moving, I am not really moving. 00:37:08.940 --> 00:37:12.220 It's a very pragmatic approach. 00:37:12.220 --> 00:37:20.900 But I have more important things to do than try to force people to go to some version of the language. 00:37:20.900 --> 00:37:21.280 Sure. 00:37:21.780 --> 00:37:23.640 Basically, that's what it boils down to. 00:37:23.640 --> 00:37:31.220 There are plenty of comments of mine on the interwebs in regards to the state of Python 3. 00:37:31.220 --> 00:37:34.520 There is really not much else to add to that. 00:37:34.520 --> 00:37:35.440 Sure. 00:37:35.840 --> 00:37:37.820 And I don't necessarily want to make the whole show about that. 00:37:37.820 --> 00:37:38.880 So that's all good. 00:37:38.880 --> 00:37:41.080 But what do you think the future of Python is? 00:37:41.080 --> 00:37:43.100 Like where are things going more broadly? 00:37:43.100 --> 00:37:44.600 I don't know. 00:37:45.860 --> 00:37:50.120 So there's always like what's the future of a programming language? 00:37:50.120 --> 00:37:51.920 And then what's the future of what I will be doing? 00:37:51.920 --> 00:37:54.860 I don't know what the future of Python is as a programming language. 00:37:54.860 --> 00:37:57.840 That it will do something. 00:37:59.980 --> 00:38:11.860 For me personally, the sort of development I've been doing more and more in the last couple of years makes me feel like I probably want to start picking up other technologies as well. 00:38:11.860 --> 00:38:16.260 I started writing a lot more JavaScript, even though I don't like the experience. 00:38:16.260 --> 00:38:18.400 I started writing a ton of Rust. 00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:22.060 I picked up a little bit of Golang just for fun. 00:38:22.060 --> 00:38:25.040 And then I'm starting to write a lot more C and C++ as well. 00:38:25.920 --> 00:38:32.480 So by share of how much time I spend on one programming language, Python is still above 50%, but it's dropping. 00:38:32.480 --> 00:38:37.840 And that is probably for me personally that I will start to look at other things as well. 00:38:37.840 --> 00:38:42.720 Python will always be there for the things I have been doing with it in the past. 00:38:42.720 --> 00:38:44.980 But I might just be doing different things in the future. 00:38:44.980 --> 00:38:46.700 Yeah, that makes sense. 00:38:46.700 --> 00:38:52.940 I think if you look at the types of technologies that have been used and what's popular and what's not and so on. 00:38:52.940 --> 00:38:58.920 And in the last couple of years, there have been so many, maybe the last five years, so many new technologies. 00:38:58.920 --> 00:39:04.620 It used to be like, well, are you a C++ or a Java or a .NET or Python guy? 00:39:04.620 --> 00:39:06.260 And there was like a few choices, right? 00:39:06.260 --> 00:39:10.820 And now it's a hundred types of frameworks in JavaScript. 00:39:10.820 --> 00:39:12.800 And there's so many variations. 00:39:13.800 --> 00:39:21.060 I think there's one thing that's happening, which is that people used to associate programmers with a programming language really strongly. 00:39:21.060 --> 00:39:27.560 And now if you look at some of those people that used to be associated with one programming language, they're actually doing different things. 00:39:27.560 --> 00:39:34.900 Like, for instance, a good example is the packaging infrastructure in the Rust programming language is written by Ruby people. 00:39:35.700 --> 00:39:46.920 And not just any Ruby people, but the ones who wrote Bundler, which is one of, if not the most popular way to do, to basically work with gems in Ruby. 00:39:47.520 --> 00:39:53.820 So you have this sort of situation where people just jump from community to community. 00:39:53.820 --> 00:40:01.340 Ian Bicking, who was the heart and soul of web development and Python, moved over and started doing JavaScript. 00:40:02.200 --> 00:40:09.480 So it's, and then you have people from JavaScript who moved to Python or who moved to even C# or something. 00:40:09.480 --> 00:40:13.220 So it's not that people stay very strong in one community. 00:40:13.220 --> 00:40:18.320 They don't leave it, but they might just also start using other technologies. 00:40:18.320 --> 00:40:20.520 And I think that's more common now. 00:40:20.520 --> 00:40:22.680 Yeah, and I think it's probably healthy, right? 00:40:22.680 --> 00:40:24.680 You get exposed to a lot more that way. 00:40:24.680 --> 00:40:25.240 Cool. 00:40:25.240 --> 00:40:29.840 Before we move off Flask, what are the notable deployments Flask like? 00:40:29.920 --> 00:40:32.880 Do you know popular websites running it or things like this? 00:40:32.880 --> 00:40:34.220 I don't know. 00:40:34.220 --> 00:40:37.740 I used to keep this powered by Flask page running. 00:40:37.740 --> 00:40:44.180 But fundamentally, one problem you have with Flask is people will start using it at one point. 00:40:44.180 --> 00:40:53.260 And then if you look at the same website after one and a half years, it has either disappeared because the website was of a startup was not a good business idea or something. 00:40:53.260 --> 00:40:56.940 Or it would grow and become larger. 00:40:56.940 --> 00:41:01.920 And then all of a sudden, it will outgrow what it had and might change technology. 00:41:01.920 --> 00:41:03.280 So I don't know. 00:41:03.280 --> 00:41:06.760 I don't keep track of what currently runs Flask or not. 00:41:06.760 --> 00:41:09.020 I know that Discuss was using it heavily. 00:41:09.020 --> 00:41:12.640 I think they still are, but I think they're using some Go. 00:41:13.600 --> 00:41:20.600 Yeah, so it's very hard to say what website is based on what technology at this point, especially for a framework. 00:41:20.600 --> 00:41:25.620 Because it's a small part in the overall execution of the whole thing. 00:41:25.620 --> 00:41:28.800 So I don't know what currently runs on Flask. 00:41:28.800 --> 00:41:30.940 I know there are plenty of websites which do use it. 00:41:31.340 --> 00:41:34.820 Yeah, if you have 14,000 stars on GitHub, there's definitely a lot of people using it. 00:41:34.820 --> 00:41:36.860 So it's just not clear what they are, right? 00:41:36.860 --> 00:41:39.100 They're dark matter websites. 00:41:39.100 --> 00:41:41.120 Nice. 00:41:41.120 --> 00:41:44.060 So one of the other things that you brought up was Rust. 00:41:44.060 --> 00:41:46.700 Is that a language that Mozilla came up with? 00:41:46.700 --> 00:41:52.880 It's not Mozilla came up with, but Mozilla started supporting the development heavily. 00:41:53.320 --> 00:41:53.640 Okay. 00:41:53.640 --> 00:41:55.140 So what is Rust? 00:41:55.140 --> 00:41:56.980 Rust is definitely not Python. 00:41:56.980 --> 00:41:58.660 It's a completely different language. 00:41:58.660 --> 00:42:01.500 It's more C++ than it is Python. 00:42:01.500 --> 00:42:06.000 It's a really weird language in what it tries to do. 00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:15.200 And I find it interesting because it's the first time that someone came up with a really crazy idea of how to build something. 00:42:15.200 --> 00:42:23.960 And it actually turned out practical enough that it might start sort of a new way of thinking of how to do programming. 00:42:23.960 --> 00:42:24.980 That's really awesome. 00:42:24.980 --> 00:42:27.140 It's a system-level language, right? 00:42:27.140 --> 00:42:29.160 It's basically a system-level language. 00:42:29.160 --> 00:42:38.900 By system-level language, it means a language that gives you low-level access to the operating system, nearly as C or C++ do. 00:42:38.900 --> 00:42:41.260 Or the same way C and C++ do. 00:42:41.260 --> 00:42:44.320 But unlike C and C++, Rust doesn't crash on you. 00:42:44.580 --> 00:42:48.000 It doesn't feel like you have to juggle with pointers or anything of that sort. 00:42:48.000 --> 00:42:55.280 It feels very much like you're programming in something very high-level, like Python or C#. 00:42:55.280 --> 00:42:58.320 Something that is very friendly to you as a developer. 00:42:58.320 --> 00:43:02.920 But it has manual memory management in the sense that there is no garbage collector. 00:43:02.920 --> 00:43:04.120 There is no reference counting. 00:43:04.120 --> 00:43:07.540 It achieves this... 00:43:07.540 --> 00:43:09.160 I would say this... 00:43:09.160 --> 00:43:10.360 I don't know what it achieves. 00:43:10.360 --> 00:43:13.180 Basically, it achieves the way of development. 00:43:13.960 --> 00:43:15.220 It is very high-level. 00:43:15.220 --> 00:43:25.020 But also, at the same time, very close to the hardware by tracking who owns what piece of memory at what point in time. 00:43:25.260 --> 00:43:29.840 And it's a very interesting way to develop because it makes you think a little bit more about what you're doing. 00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:33.760 And it also rules out a ton of problems in the process. 00:43:33.760 --> 00:43:42.020 It makes you a better developer just because it tells you to rethink things that you could otherwise do in programming languages, which were a terrible idea. 00:43:42.680 --> 00:43:53.940 I had an example a couple of days ago where I was showing how threading issues in Python are something that can just happen. 00:43:54.480 --> 00:43:59.500 Or they will naturally happen because there's nothing in the language that prevents you from doing something really stupid. 00:43:59.500 --> 00:44:04.980 Like not mutex locking some important piece of code. 00:44:05.860 --> 00:44:13.000 And Rust is different because this concept of memory ownership helps really greatly when you build anything concurrent. 00:44:13.000 --> 00:44:16.820 So it's a very interesting language for that reason. 00:44:17.080 --> 00:44:21.500 I find it exciting because there's never been anything like this before. 00:44:21.500 --> 00:44:27.900 There were languages like Java, Go, which have garbage collector and achieve safety this way. 00:44:27.900 --> 00:44:34.520 And there have been languages like C and Z++, which have been very fast, but also very frustrating if you did something wrong. 00:44:34.520 --> 00:44:37.660 And just generally not very fun to work with. 00:44:37.660 --> 00:44:40.600 And Rust just is very different in that sense. 00:44:41.080 --> 00:44:41.720 That's really cool. 00:44:41.720 --> 00:44:44.240 It sounds inspiring like I should check it out. 00:44:44.240 --> 00:44:46.320 What kind of things do I build with Rust? 00:44:46.320 --> 00:44:50.760 Well, the thing is, Rust just came out 1.0 finally a couple of days ago. 00:44:50.760 --> 00:44:57.600 So at the moment, you probably can build less stuff with this than with many other languages just because it's very new. 00:44:57.600 --> 00:45:01.720 But there's already a handful of stuff you can build really well with Rust. 00:45:01.720 --> 00:45:10.620 If you're in the computer games, there's a ton of really good libraries that you can use to build your own game engines and just your own games. 00:45:10.760 --> 00:45:21.420 It has excellent support for doing basic game mathematics operations, talking to your graphics card, getting input from joysticks and game pads and just keyboard and mouse. 00:45:21.420 --> 00:45:23.700 So that's a very strong area. 00:45:23.700 --> 00:45:27.660 And that's just natural to the language because that's why it's very strong. 00:45:27.660 --> 00:45:32.120 But it also already has really good support for doing web applications. 00:45:32.120 --> 00:45:36.320 The database drivers, you can talk to Redis, you can talk, I think, to MongoDB. 00:45:36.320 --> 00:45:39.920 There's a couple of web frameworks for it. 00:45:40.440 --> 00:45:46.240 They all feel very different than frameworks do in Python just because it's more rigid. 00:45:46.240 --> 00:45:55.160 But if you're into writing JavaScript applications with a backend API, you can do that quite well in Rust already. 00:45:55.160 --> 00:46:00.260 In fact, what the Python package index for Rust is, it's called crates.io. 00:46:00.260 --> 00:46:03.200 That is entirely written in Rust itself. 00:46:03.200 --> 00:46:04.600 And you can get the source code. 00:46:05.020 --> 00:46:07.740 You said crates, like C-R-A-T-E-S? 00:46:07.740 --> 00:46:08.920 Okay, cool. 00:46:08.920 --> 00:46:11.280 How many packages are there? 00:46:11.280 --> 00:46:14.120 3,000, I think. 00:46:14.120 --> 00:46:14.920 I don't know, actually. 00:46:14.920 --> 00:46:17.040 Yeah, we got 2,200 already. 00:46:17.040 --> 00:46:18.320 So it sounds like it's growing fast. 00:46:18.320 --> 00:46:18.780 That's awesome. 00:46:20.060 --> 00:46:21.060 Yeah, it's doing really well. 00:46:21.060 --> 00:46:22.280 So it doesn't have 3,000 yet. 00:46:22.280 --> 00:46:23.460 But it is growing. 00:46:23.460 --> 00:46:25.860 And it has... 00:46:25.860 --> 00:46:36.200 Because it is a new programming language, many of the problems that we still fight with in the Python community in getting our infrastructure improved, Rust never had as a problem. 00:46:36.200 --> 00:46:41.000 Like, for instance, the packaging in Rust is really good. 00:46:41.780 --> 00:46:47.760 It is a perfect package manager that comes with the system, which makes development a ton of fun. 00:46:47.760 --> 00:46:51.980 It's similar to how the JavaScript community had npm quite early on. 00:46:51.980 --> 00:46:55.960 We have with the combination of pip and VirtualLine and everything. 00:46:55.960 --> 00:47:02.140 But for those systems, it just already becomes as a base package, basically. 00:47:02.140 --> 00:47:05.780 It's really cool that basically that came out with it as it... 00:47:05.780 --> 00:47:08.500 You know, from day one, that was there, right? 00:47:08.500 --> 00:47:08.960 That's nice. 00:47:08.960 --> 00:47:09.640 Yeah. 00:47:10.040 --> 00:47:11.380 So Cargo came... 00:47:11.380 --> 00:47:18.140 Well, it wasn't day one, because if you consider Rust is already a couple of years old by now because it had a long development path. 00:47:18.140 --> 00:47:24.880 But Rust 1.0, so the official release, comes with package manager and linters and documentation tool and everything. 00:47:24.880 --> 00:47:26.240 Yeah, really nice. 00:47:26.240 --> 00:47:28.060 Okay, so I'm definitely going to check out Rust. 00:47:28.060 --> 00:47:28.700 That sounds neat. 00:47:28.700 --> 00:47:33.980 Armin, I think that might be a good place to wrap up the show. 00:47:33.980 --> 00:47:37.440 Before we finish, though, I'd like to ask you a question I always ask my guests, 00:47:38.300 --> 00:47:41.080 which is, what's your favorite PyPI package? 00:47:41.080 --> 00:47:45.380 Or what are some notable ones that you would like to call people's attention to? 00:47:45.380 --> 00:47:46.300 Like, say, hey, this is awesome. 00:47:46.300 --> 00:47:46.780 Check it out. 00:47:46.780 --> 00:47:49.100 Oh, that's hard. 00:47:49.100 --> 00:47:51.520 Well, I can't name any of my own ones, obviously. 00:47:51.520 --> 00:47:52.760 I'll name them for you. 00:47:52.760 --> 00:47:54.640 So Flask, Click, and... 00:47:54.640 --> 00:47:56.800 It's probably SQLAlchemy. 00:47:56.800 --> 00:47:58.240 It's my favorite package. 00:47:58.240 --> 00:48:00.080 It ends up almost everywhere. 00:48:00.460 --> 00:48:01.860 And it's just really good. 00:48:01.860 --> 00:48:03.860 So that will have to be it. 00:48:03.860 --> 00:48:06.160 Yeah, SQLAlchemy really is amazing. 00:48:06.160 --> 00:48:08.540 And we had Mike on for show five, I think. 00:48:08.540 --> 00:48:09.880 Yeah, SQLAlchemy is amazing. 00:48:09.880 --> 00:48:10.480 Cool. 00:48:10.480 --> 00:48:13.220 And what editor are you using these days for your Python stuff? 00:48:13.220 --> 00:48:14.780 I'm still using Vim. 00:48:14.780 --> 00:48:17.180 I'm trying to migrate over to a new Vim. 00:48:17.180 --> 00:48:19.340 So that might happen soon. 00:48:19.340 --> 00:48:20.780 But so far, it's Vim. 00:48:20.780 --> 00:48:21.680 All right. 00:48:21.680 --> 00:48:22.060 Awesome. 00:48:22.060 --> 00:48:24.700 Armin, thank you for being on the show. 00:48:24.700 --> 00:48:25.600 It's been a great conversation. 00:48:26.320 --> 00:48:26.680 You're welcome. 00:48:26.680 --> 00:48:27.300 It was fun. 00:48:27.300 --> 00:48:28.560 Yeah. 00:48:28.560 --> 00:48:29.440 See you later. 00:48:29.440 --> 00:48:34.020 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 00:48:34.020 --> 00:48:36.000 Today's guest was Armin Roenaker. 00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:40.160 And this episode has been sponsored by CodeChip and Hired. 00:48:40.160 --> 00:48:42.220 Thank you guys for supporting the show. 00:48:42.220 --> 00:48:45.040 Check out CodeChip at CodeChip.com 00:48:45.040 --> 00:48:47.200 and thank them on Twitter via at CodeChip. 00:48:47.200 --> 00:48:49.300 Don't forget the discount code for listeners. 00:48:49.300 --> 00:48:50.000 It's easy. 00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:52.540 Talk Python, all caps, no spaces. 00:48:52.540 --> 00:48:55.740 Hired wants to help you find your next big thing. 00:48:56.260 --> 00:48:58.900 Visit Hired.com slash Talk Python To Me 00:48:58.900 --> 00:49:02.840 to get five or more offers with salary and equity right up front 00:49:02.840 --> 00:49:06.880 and a special listener signing bonus of $4,000. 00:49:06.880 --> 00:49:12.900 Also, don't forget, an awesome t-shirt awaits you at bit.ly slash PythonShirt 00:49:12.900 --> 00:49:16.780 or just visit our website and click on shirt in the footer. 00:49:16.780 --> 00:49:20.680 You can find the links of the show at Talk Python To Me.com 00:49:20.680 --> 00:49:23.600 slash episodes slash show slash 13. 00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:26.340 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 00:49:26.340 --> 00:49:28.740 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 00:49:28.740 --> 00:49:29.980 We should be right at the top. 00:49:29.980 --> 00:49:34.460 You can also find the iTunes and direct RSS feeds in the footer of the website. 00:49:34.460 --> 00:49:36.340 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:49:36.340 --> 00:49:37.480 Thanks for listening. 00:49:37.480 --> 00:49:39.860 Smix, take us out of here. 00:49:40.400 --> 00:49:41.560 Staying with my voice. 00:49:41.560 --> 00:49:41.560 Staying with my voice. 00:49:41.560 --> 00:49:43.340 There's no norm that I can feel within. 00:49:43.340 --> 00:49:44.560 Haven't been sleeping. 00:49:44.560 --> 00:49:46.180 I've been using lots of rest. 00:49:46.180 --> 00:49:49.040 I'll pass the mic back to who rocked it best. 00:49:49.040 --> 00:50:01.240 I'll pass the mic.