Sitting in the lunch refectory, writing about the talks I've witnessed:

The savoury flavors of Python 2.6 and 3.0

Python 3.0 will fix almost all the minor inconsistencies that bit me when I was trying to learn Python (including unicode, Exceptions, sorting and floor division)

I really liked the changes, enough so that I've downloaded Python 3.0b3 and compiled it, though I'm not sure if I'm going to find any actual time this weekend to fiddle around.

Named tuples are oh so cool, we are definitely going to use them right now (you can get the recipe here)

I like the print function, makes me think that file.write will be made obscure, which is probably a good thing. Class decorators? Good. Simplified formatting everywhere? Good.

I can't actually remember much more, but I found myself nodding on mostly everything, so I guess that's a good thing.

PyPy

PyPy is a very interesting project that promises to solve all the minor incompatibilities between various Python implementations by providing a stack for writing interpreters and generating JIT compilers for them, to target different backends.

This means that once you have say, the C, JVM and CLR backends working (from what I could gather, the C one is top priority with the other 2 chugging along nicely), you can tweak your interpreter specification (for example, for Python 3.1) and generate 3 different compilers that are 100% compatible (and fast!). How cool is that?

The second PyPy talk was about the internals of the JIT generation, which was complicated enough for me to not remember many details, but it does affirm that even PyPy seems very ambitious, the people working on it are capable of pulling it off.

py.test

py.test is a part of the more general pylib. It is very good though unfortunately it doesn't run on IronPython since it does some stack frame magic. I'm pondering about moving PySmell to using it, though I don't really like external dependencies.

Stay tuned for more updates about PyCon UK!