Python Bytes - #357 Python 3.7 EOLed, We Hadn't Noticed

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Topics covered in this episode: QuickMacHotKey Things I’ve learned about building CLI tools in Python Warp Terminal (referral code) Python 3.7 EOLed, but I hadn’t noticed Extras Joke See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/357

Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. This is episode 357, recorded October 17th, and I am Brian Ocken. And I am Michael Kennedy. And our show is sponsored by us. Check out TalkPythonTraining, of course, with those wonderful courses from Michael and other people, including myself, and Patreon supporters supporters of course we love patreon supporters we haven't really talked to him much lately to sending out emails i should do that more

and lastly the complete pi test course please check it out if you want to learn pi test the fastest way possible uh and you can connect with us on mastodonon, on Mastodon, on Fostodon, both of those. And Michael's at M. Kennedy. I'm at Brian Ocken, and the show is at Python Bytes. And you can also listen live if you head over to pythonbytes.fm slash live, and you can watch it when we live stream as we are right now. Absolutely. So Michael, let's kick it off with something hot. Let's kick it off. I want to

talk about a couple of, well, something I've learned from Glyph when I was at PyBay. Is that last weekend? Two weekends ago? Last weekend, I guess. Glyph gave a really cool talk. Some of the talks are starting to show up on YouTube, but it's his talk is not there yet, or I would link to it. And it was something along the lines of like, how to program your computer with Python, which sounds silly because we're all pretty good Python programmers. Like you should think, okay, well I could do that. But this was about how do I automate stuff? How do I plug into things?

Like how can I automate Keynote to extract show notes out, to put into another document or PowerPoint or things along those lines. And one of the things that he both created and talked about was this thing called Quick Mac Hotkey because you might want to have your Python not have a UI you're interacting with, but just be chilling in the background. And if you had a certain hotkey, it does the thing, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So this Quick Mac Hotkey does that. And basically it's super simple to use. It's just a set of minimal Python bindings for macOS framework APIs using what does it use for it to pull this off? Oh yeah, PyOBJC I believe is what it's using. So it's super easy to write

some code, you want to have a function that's called when a keystroke is down, you just give it the decorator, quick, hot, quick, hot key, and you say the virtual key is the x, the modifier is command control option. So just hit all three of those plus x, you know, something that's most likely not going to interfere with some other behavior, and then boom, off it goes. And look how simple that code is. Isn't that nice? Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Although I don't know if I can find my command control and hotkey at the same time, but cool. Yeah, I use a Windows keyboard, unfortunately, because there's no ergonomic Mac keyboards. Apparently Apple hates people, and they want them to have RSI for the rest of their life. Does the window key

map to the command key? Yeah, the window key is just the command key. So it's nothing too fancy. So there's not a lot of depth that we've got to dive into this, other than how cool is it if you want to just add hot keys here. Off you go. Okay, so when you install it, does it just run all the time or something?

I think whenever your app is running. Okay. Like, so you can see the last line of this example, it says app helper dot run event loop. Okay. So that's just like set there in the background and just wait for events. For example,

it's this quick hotkey callback when somebody presses that. So one of those though could be exit, you know, and just, you know, I don't know how you exit the event loop, either raise an exception or just exit or who knows. There's got to be a way to get out of there. Reboot your computer.

Exactly. It's like Vim. You're just in there. Nice. All right. Over to you. Well, I'm going to talk about command lines applications a little bit because Simon Wilson had things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python.

And I really kind of like all the stuff he covered. I really liked them. I mean, this isn't a super in-depth, like how to write CLI tools, but some of the things like just high level when you're writing command line applications it's good to be rather consistent with other command line applications to make it easy to use because it's going to be used by people that like CLIs, right? So a couple of option things here.

Be consistent with the terms. Well, you have to kind of understand the terms, but there's commands, there's arguments, there's options and flags, and sometimes flags are options. And yeah, anyway, uh, so commands have our, he's using click applications. So the, um, he actually talks about click and also using a cookie cutter template that he, he lists, um, at hook app on Simon W on GitHub. But the, or yeah, cookie cutter template to build these, which is cool. I like Typer, which is built on top of Click.

So anyway, but these are still good advice. Like make sure that your options, you know what options are, and then make sure you have like a short character. So if you have dash dash port, also include dash P as a short version because people are used to that. There's mostly just a lot of description around making sure your flags and options and stuff are consistent.

And I actually think people ought to get used to writing more CLI apps because especially for utilities for yourself and for a team, they're great because you'll use it all the time and you get used to it. It's easier than building a GUI application. So consistency is everything. Try to be consistent with it. One of the great thing the great advice here so is pay attention to your help message so um a lot of cli tools like typer and click kind of build a help for you so that it prints out like the options and stuff that you can you can list which is great but you have to go in and add things like um uh put examples so example uses of like the entire application or the entire option and how to use it um this is extremely helpful and i

really appreciate it even just for myself so that um like six months from now i can remember how to use it things like that so include options in the help. And then the other thing is the lastly, oh, examples, examples in help. And there's a couple other things. Oh, include the output of your help in your online documentation. And there's ways to automate that. But I think that's great to just list it because I'm looking for it when I'm looking at the, like at the bottom of the read me or something. The lastly is if you have a CLI that's being used by other people, make sure that you version it appropriately because, because it is an API. A command line interface is,

can be used by other programs. So treat it as an API, even if the other user is somebody's fingers, because if things change, people should know about it. So anyway, good application or a good article about building command line applications. And then his cool cookie cutter template for Qlik apps. It's nice. Excellent.

Yeah, nice work, Simon. A couple of pieces of real-time follow-up here. One, audience is on point today. So Kim out there says, Rich Click is also fantastic if you use Click. And I definitely agree on that. So it's like Click, but all the help messages and stuff are in color using Rich and little info boxes and stuff.

And then Rhett, who was on TalkPython to talk about programming Mac apps, macOS apps, highlights that this quick hotkey thing sounds like a good opportunity for a Rumps menu bar app. So Rumps is awesome. I was actually thinking of adding this hotkey thing

exactly for one of my Rumps menu bar apps, which is just an unfair level of easy for building a Mac app that just runs in your menu bar. Oh, cool. Yeah. We've talked about that, but it's been a while. It has been a while, but you've got to, for me, I've got to go and find it and like make it do the thing. I'm like, you know what? Hotkey. Oh yeah. Here we go. Now it's on. Now it's going to the next level. So yeah super cool all right that's not what i want to talk about but some good real-time follow-up what i want to talk about is warp and this is also an item from pi bay indirectly i ran into elvis who works there and have you

heard of warp brian no well i mean warp speed yes i know okay gotta resist the star wars references um it's it's super cool So what terminal do you use? Like when you go to use the built-in Mac one, do you use iTerm2 or what's your story? Well, I've used the built-in Mac one on Mac and then on Windows, I use the what? The Windows terminal. Well, that was a good one.

No, the Git Bash, Git for Windows Bash comes with Bash. So I use that. Okay. Yeah. You should check out the Windows Terminal and then plug the Git for Bash into it. You get like, it behaves better and you can pick from like nine different shells and like things that run inside the Windows Terminal. Anyway, Windows Terminal is awesome.

But we don't have Windows Terminal on Mac, which is just fine because we have iTerm and other things. But I want to tell you about Warp, because Warp is a new terminal that has got quite a bit of energy behind it. And it's awesome. So I think there's 30 people working on this project, if I remember correctly. But there's a good number of people that are working on building this new terminal based on rust and it even is programmed in metal shaders metals are like the opengl directx mac equivalent for making it super super fast but basically like there's a bunch of shortcomings that always drove me crazy about the terminal and there's a lot of things that are pretty nice here so it's a free thing for individuals if you're a

company you got to pay for it if you want any company features uh but it's it's a free thing for individuals. If you're a company, you got to pay for it if you want to company features. But it's worth checking out. So for example, if you write something, Brian, like I write some multi-line command and you're like, oh no, I forgot the quote at the beginning. You know, how do you fix it in iTerm? Left arrow, left arrow, left arrow, left arrow, left arrow. Like even home doesn't work. You know, left arrow, left arrow, left arrow. You wait and you get back there and you type the quote, right arrow, right arrow to get the focus back. Like clicking where you want to be doesn't work, right? For example. Well, you use Vim key bindings and just go there with Vim. Do you have Vim key bindings in the standard terminal?

Yes. Everywhere. Yeah? Okay. All right. Everywhere. Yeah? Okay. Alright. Awesome. Well, so this one, like basically all the stuff you type at the bottom or wherever you're typing is

like a full-on editor, which also has Vim key bindings if you want. Yay! Okay. Then I'll try it. Okay. You can turn them on if you want, but you can basically click in there and edit pieces. Like you can double-click, it'll select a word, you start typing, it replaces that. Super cool, it has like a kind of a new way to like keep your input focused in one area, which is really nice. So instead of it just being at the bottom of the

screen, you can have it like always at the top or always at the bottom. Um, one of the things that's cool is like, it treats the output of every command as a solid, as one thing. So if I do like an LS and there's like 50 lines and I tail a catalog or something, and there's like a thousand lines. And then if you want to go back, you can actually just go back by selecting each block of that. So go back a thousand lines, go back 50 lines, do a search. You can search just that 50 line section from that one command, even though your terminal is full of junk. Super super super cool uh it does tons of autocomplete which is super neat um let's see one thing else um you can if you do some kind of command you're just talking about like simon asking chat gpt for what does like a command mean so if you said like ls-1 what does the one mean

you know you hover over the one it'll like pop up little documentation for what dash one means oh that's cool yeah uh also as ai built in if you want i might use that very much but you could like say hash how do i you know write this kind of loop in bash or whatever and it'll it'll print it out for you but i don't use that one too much but anyway super super cool. A lot of interesting things. It has the control R history, kind of like McFly, which I've talked a lot

about how cool McFly is. So giving this thing a try for a few weeks. Really enjoying it so far. Cool. Love to try it. Yeah. So people can check that out. And yeah, pretty neat. Kim says we've come a long way from a few years ago when Windows Terminal and Awesome is in the same sentence. It's, yeah.

I thought it was a joke also. I didn't, I can't believe that you said that. No, Windows Terminal is, it's, I don't want to be on Wikipedia, but it is definitely, definitely nice. So I'm not on my Windows machine and I'm not sharing my terminal anyway, but let's see if I can get it to show hotkey. So like, and it doesn't really show it great, but you can

click on this, like you set what the default shell is that you want it to do, but you can click this. It'd be like the bash shell, the, um, power shell, whatever that these play music. I can't take it, but yeah. anyway, the Windows, yeah, check out Windows Terminal. It's actually good. And Kim is right. We've come a long ways, but yeah. Okay. All right.

All right. You convinced me, I think. So I'll try it. Give it a try. Give it a try. All right. What's your final thing? People should check out Warp.

It's pretty neat. I will. Yeah. Oh, hold on. One more important thing here. Mac only for the moment for people, but they're working on Linux and Windows. So you can sign up to get notified

if you're not a Mac person. So just that caveat for now. I, did you, Python 3.7 end of life, and I didn't even notice. What? That was a good one. That was one of the good ones.

You can trust that one. So 3.7 end of life was in June, in June 27th. No, that was the first release. End of Life also. End of Life 6.27.23. Interesting. But why did I not notice it? I didn't notice it because everybody's, like you said, 3.7 was one of the good ones. We have data classes in there. F-strings came in 3.6, and they got improved in 3.7, and then they got improved in 3.10 again, and all sorts of stuff. But it is something to pay attention to. I noticed the first notice today, I was looking at the VS Code announcement for the new, what was this?

Python for Visual Studio Code, October, 2023 release mentions, um, that, uh, the three seven support is still, it's still probably works, but they're deprecating three seven in support. So just to be aware, uh, I was also surprised if it didn't work because what was removed in three eight that was in three seven like syntax wise not functional wise i i can't think of anything uh yeah so that i so there's a couple projects or several projects that i'm supporting where i support down to three seven um i dropped three six a while ago uh but one of the things that catches me a lot,

the remaining thing that catches me is annotations. And I want to cover, like, if you really want to still support 3.7 or didn't know that it was this easy, at least for the code I write, the main thing is I like to use union types. So I like to use this or type for unions. And this came in in 3.10. However, I can't find this documented anywhere,

but to get it to work down to 3.7, you can do from future import annotations. And we've been used to using the from future for various things for a while, but it looks like 3 three seven might be the end of needing from future for a while. I don't know, maybe they'll come up with something else that they're backboarding.

But it doesn't look like there's anything else right now up to 312 that you need to go back down. It's just annotations so far. So, and I guess I want to show a little bit of an example for the annotations. So for data classes, data classes are awesome because you can type the variable that you're using. And then I often like to have it be none by default, which so a string, it's going to be a string or it's none.

So the or none is easy just to do the or none. And I know you can do optional, but this is just visually more pleasing to me. And to get that to work down to three, seven, it's yeah, it's just the from future important annotations and it'll work all the way down to three, seven.

So it's just what I wanted to mention. And I think that it's also good to be aware, I guess that, that three, seven is end of life because some of the things you depend on might start dropping support for 3.7. It's fair game at this point.

I mean, open source projects, they're fair game to drop support for everything below 3.12 if they want to. No one's signed a contract with anyone here. They can do what they want. Yeah, but it's good to be aware of. It certainly is. That's a what they want. Yeah, but it's good to be aware of. It certainly is.

It certainly is. That's a cool graph you got there, too. Yeah, yeah. Is that in the show notes? Yeah, it's from devguide.python.org with the versions. Yeah, Christian Lederman says, Walrus was introduced in 3.8. I don't know if you can do it from future import Walrus.

I don't think so. If you do, you have to do an emoji, not the actual word walrus. But you got to put the emoji of a walrus and then it'll work. Well, I'm waiting for like emoji operators. So that would be fun to have to put, not just can put, but you have to put emojis in your code. So what happens when the cat raises its paw against an integer? Oh, let me tell you, that one's really awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, some of those conversations, like Christian was saying that, I think where I was saying, what is in 3.7 that's not in 3.8? And those are all true, all those things. There are new things, but if you wrote 3.7 code and then ran it against 3.8, it should still validate in MyPy.

It should still work in Python, right? There's no thing that was in 3.7 that because MyPy is not supporting it, it will say removed that caused all sorts of drama for me because some library I was using didn't use the word async. They just used the decorators. But even that, a decorator should still validate in MyPy with that context, right? Maybe I'll revisit my opinion of supporting 3.7, so we can use the Walrus operator in 3.8. But Henry Schreiner also notes that the equal for F strings, so that you can say X equal, and it'll print the X equal. That's super handy.

Yeah, it's good for debugging. Yeah, and just having having that stuff in your uh in your code like that'd be great so yeah and these things are super small and subtle like the walrus operator i take i took the website down with the walrus operator once i said i told that story before yeah and like not even the main website just it was in a little utility but it got parsed by the route finding thing and killed it. Well, that's it for items, huh? Yeah, it is. Awesome. Extras? What you got? I got a couple since I got my

screen up. Just one of the examples I showed was from a new plugin that I just released called PyTest Paramscope, and this allows you to for parameterized fixtures, or for parameterized tests, to have a startup that goes,

a setup that happens before all the parameters and a teardown that happens at the end. It's still, the API is up, there's a warning here because the API might change with respect to teardown, working on yield functions for that. I also, I was gonna cover this as a full thing. Oh yeah, this is just sort of how you use it you get like a setup and turn it oh no this is this is how i want to do it this is

the change that i might do of adding yield so anyway um uh simon willison uh wrote a article called uh stop defining people no not simon willison sorry josh simmons uh sorry josh uh wrote an article called stop defining people by what they are not um and he was referring to non-code contributors and i kind of agree so i wanted to highlight this article this is this is great just basically saying all contributions are awesome and trying to and elevating code contributors above non-code contributors is just not right, so don't do that. Also, it's just referring, I mean, if somebody only writes, just mostly helps with your test code,

you don't have to call, I mean, you can say somebody that's contributing test code. You don't have to say, oh, that's non-code. Well, that's still code. But anyway, you know what I mean. Yeah. People helping with documentation is great help. People helping with writing tutorials is great help.

Everything is good. So, anyway. Sometimes it's more important to have a good example so people can get started quickly. Oh, yeah. And enjoy the project rather than like one more feature, you know? Yeah. And also things like cleaning, triaging issues and answering questions and keeping, you know, making sure that all the issues are closed when their things get fixed and all that sort of stuff is tons of work. So it's great help.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any extras? I got a couple quick ones here. So OpenAI has released the beta version of their Python SDK. It's pretty exciting. So if you don't want to implement your own raw HTTP, JSON parsing, and hope that you got everything right, you just go there, start calling the functions that they write for you. And it should be going nicely. So it's still in beta, but people can check that out. That's pretty awesome. I think, was it here? I can't remember somewhere. No, it wasn't here. Maybe it was on the linked

article. There was somewhere where there's a bunch of people whinging, like, why can't people just call HTTP? They're so lazy. They want a library for it. Like, you know what? Maybe like let somebody else handle the evolution of that API. You just call a stable Python set of functions and not worry about that. Wouldn't call that lazy. I would call that PyPI and call it awesome. Anyway, so people are into open AI. What do you need Python for? Just call the raw C API.

Exactly. Can I just do this with like a bunch of bash scripts and some curl? Let's go. All right. So sad news here is, um, chat GPT is how not that overflow. I'm probably because partly a chat GPT, get that in order right there. Stack overflow is laying off 28% of their staff. It's kind of surprising, huh? Yeah. Which turns out to be a hundred to 200 people. Like a lot of people, not like they had four people and they laid one of them off.

But he was really important. What exactly would you say you do here? No. I didn't know that Stack Overflow had so many people working for him though. I know. It was founded just by Joel Spolsky and Cody Norgay, whose name I don't remember anyway. But yeah, it's growing to be super, super big. And I don't know. I always sometimes wonder like, do you really need a thousand people to run that website? I mean, maybe, but maybe you just don't anyway. Uh, that's a whole different discussion, but, um, so there's some interesting conversation saying

maybe this is because of chat GPT and Google Copilot and all these other things. Like instead of going to Stack Overflow to go, how do I connect this type of thing to that type of database? You can just ask your coding assistant or your chat buddy and you'll get a great example. Oftentimes more specific, right? Like, yeah, but I'm using this version. Oh, well, if it's that version, you got to pass this argument too. Right. Thanks.

Got it. You know? So this is pretty interesting. Kind of odd or weird, like six months ago, Stack Overflow wrote a blog post that said, what's different about these layoffs in the tech industry? Not us. We're fine. Everyone else.

And then, you know, six months later, you know, go back and read you an article sadly so that's uh an interesting thing to be aware of i guess yeah uh yuri selyevanov just pointed out or posted on the ext that uv loop uh 18 is here with python 312 support so i was trying to use 3.12 on a couple of the TalkPython things and the websites are like, nope, UV loop, no, AIO HTTP, definitely not going to work on Python 3.12, which is, I think AIO HTTP still doesn't work. And sadly, some rummy dependency that I have is like using that library, which itself is not being upgraded to 3.12, at least as of like a few days ago. So this gets me halfway there, the two things that wouldn't install. One more to go.

Hanging in there for AIO-HDB. Come on now. But good news nonetheless. Thanks, Yuri, for doing that. Oh, and thanks, Kim, for reminding us that it was Jeff Atwood. Yes, of course it was. Thank you, Kim. That's the guy that went by Coding Horror.

That's what happens when you have too popular of a nickname that you've given yourself like Coding Horror in your blog. Yeah, plus that logo or icon that he's got. I can just see it in my head. I can too. I can. Like the hair on fire developer picture. Yep. Alright, those are all my extras that I got for now. Yeah. Ready

for a joke? I am. We might even have two jokes, but we'll see about that. Yeah, I've got one I wanted to share also. All right. So this one comes from Command Line Magic, but was pointed out to us by Lizzie. Said, I love it. Hey, I'm Kennedy. Maybe for the show.

And the Command Line Magic says, I've always read that global variables are bad. So this is the Star Trek thing. And can I make it bigger? Yes. The Star Trek thing shows, I can't remember this character's name, this woman scientist on a shuttle. This is all from Star Trek. And they're going right through near the edge of the sun to do some studying.

And she wants to be real careful to make sure that the ship doesn't melt. So she says, computer, notify me if temperatures get too hot. Beep, beep. Please define hot, says the computer. Let's say 1.9 million Kelvin. Okay, fair. Later, Captain Picard is at the little food making thing that materializes food. It says, tea, Earl Grey, hot. It just melts. It just sets it at 1.9 million Kelvin in his captain's quarters. Yeah. That's awesome. Isn't that good? Yeah. I like it. Yeah. A little too hot. Somebody should test this. Yeah. A little too hot. Maybe that tea was real hot. Yeah. All right. What's your joke?

So my daughter shared this with me and I just like, I haven't stopped giggling about it. So you've been to the Oregon Zoo, right? Yes. Yeah. Did you, do you know there's a new exhibit there? No. It's just a baguette in a cage. It's bred in captivity.

Oh my gosh. Bred in captivity. Yeah. That's hard to do. You know, a lot of times you try, but it just doesn't happen. Does it? I guess they pulled it off. Yeah. Awesome. This know, a lot of times you try, but it just doesn't happen, does it? I guess they pulled it off. Yeah.

Awesome. This bad, bad dad joke. Those are very bad dad jokes. But I was just thinking about going to the zoo. I haven't been there since maybe a year. I was thinking about taking my daughter back there. What's weird is we almost always go to zoo lights. Yeah.

So I see a lot of animals all in they're all in lights instead of actual the actual animals exactly we need to go yeah just put them on the wall and have them flashing for christmas that's right yeah i actually i really appreciate the uh during covid they like started doing the the drive-through zoo lights um and they still do it like partly part way so you can do drive through for a couple days or something and then they switch drive-through zoo lights. And they still do it like partly partway. So you can do drive through for a couple of days or something. And then they switched to walking. I like driving through.

It's nice. So yeah, it is nice. Definitely nice. All right. Well, we're coming up on the end of the year, so we'll have to get a report on the zoo lights.

Yeah. All right. And the bread and the captivity bread. Bread. Bye. All right. See y'all.