I will be speaking about Python at DevDays Boston, a stackoverflow event.

Stackoverflow is a Microsoft-heavy community, so Joel Spolsky wanted someone to introduce them to Python. His idea was to do a talk explaining Peter Norvig’s Python spelling corrector. It’s an interesting approach: rather than start with the basics of the language, dive into a meaty piece of code, and explain as you go.

I like it, but the spelling corrector isn’t the best showcase for what makes Python special. It makes good use of data structures and comprehensions to concisely complete an interesting task, but it doesn’t show much more of the language.

I wanted to include another piece of code, perhaps even instead of the spelling corrector. A recent piece of code that pleased me was templite.py, a bare-bones templating class along the lines of James Tauber’s Python Templates exposition. Templite adds loops into the mix, which is too much complexity, but going through some version of James’ evolution I think would be a good way to show off duck typing, classes, and the power of special methods.

But I’m sure there are other ideas out there. If you had an hour to explain Pythonic awesomeness to skilled developers, how would you do it?