What's the state of the art in when it comes to the Python web stack? Let's discuss!

The Lambda calculus is based on the idea of heavy usage of list processing and all computations are represented in functions. Everything that can be computed on a turing machine (a turing machine is based on the idea of reading and writing values in memory cells) can be computed with the lambda calculus (which uses the idea of functions as computational units). At least this is what the Church-Turing thesis claims.

In this talk I want to look at the definition of the most basic functions like map, zip, etc. I want to discuss their behavior, find them in the python standard library and then look at practical examples.

To avoid any confusion: This talk focuses on simple, powerful functions reducing your code size. It's not a talk about functional programming.

This lightning talk shows how to easily extract information from XML documents with namespaces using XPath and Python. While this is fairly trivial without namespaces, setting everything up correctly with namespaces proofed to be a daunting endeavor even with the help of lxml.