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Comment by ssanderson11235 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I always agree with this. David Beazley's 2015 PyCon talk on concurrency (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4) was one of my favorite talks of the conference, and it was almost all just live coding.

Part of what made that talk compelling was that it took a concept that lots of people find complex/intimidating (how the internals of an asynchronous IO library work) and in ~30 minutes created a full working example in front of a live audience. Writing the code live in front of the audience helps to nail down the central theme of "this stuff isn't actually as scary as it looks".

There are certainly talks that would be better of just presenting snippets of code, but I think there's a time and a place for live coding examples as well.

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Being in the crowd during this talk was seriously like being at a rock concert.

Beazley was 'playing' the keyboard like an instrument. Every square inch of floor space had someone sitting or standing. The crowd was incredibly invested - nary an eye nor ear wavered. Even Guido looked on with a hawk eye.

I was in a small circle on the floor of people who had just smoked some amazing herb before the talk. I was hanging on his every word and every expression. I've rarely felt so engaged by a conference talk. I'll never forget this one.

He received a raucous standing ovation that is not evident from the conference video.

I asked a question at the end, and I was so giddy I had trouble getting it out. :-)

As a core contributor to an async framework, I felt that this talk gave me a lot more enthusiasm and confidence about my work which has lasted to this day. I think about it often. Definitely a track for the PyCon greatest hits album.

> I was in a small circle on the floor of people who had just smoked some amazing herb before the talk.

This is a thing at software conferences?

I think it's a thing anywhere people gather, no? It's probably more a thing at community conferences than corporate conferences.

Did you stand in the designated smoking area?

The people who really know what they are doing make the complicated stuff seem dirt simple. I had Dave as the instructor for my undergrad compilers and operating systems courses back in 2000-2001. His lectures then were every bit as enlightening as his PyCon talks today. Those courses were demanding but extremely fun.

I came to the comments on this one just to make sure this talk got mentioned as a counterpoint. Fantastic explanation of everything as he went along.

As I recall, he actually took the same conceptual problem and rewrote the solution in a handful of different concurrent styles.

And no, at least in this video I can not think faster than Dave Beazley can type. By the time I've just about figured out what nuance of concurrency he's showing off in his last example, he's already got his next example typed out!

Similarly, I really enjoyed Raymond Hettinger's 2015 PyCon talk, which also had a fair amount of live coding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

Agree with this. In my undergraduate, 2nd year course of Opeating Systems, one day (pretty soon after the start) the teacher decided to write a small terminal emulator in C to show us what it really does, just there, in the classroom. It took him 2 hours of coding, but it really changed my perspective on how things really work in a UNIX based system, and on always checking in depth whether something that sounds like almost impossible really is.

Yep, there are certainly exceptions! It's not a blanket rule. Rants aren't quite as much fun if you equivocate for the 5% case though. =)

> There are certainly talks that would be better of just presenting snippets of code, but I think there's a time and a place for live coding examples as well.

Step 1. be David Beazley. He really is such an engaging speaker and I think his jokes and lightheartedness might make it look easy, but I don't think it is. Many probably think in their heads "I'll be just like David on stage" but they are not.

I have see nice demos where everything is setup and they just run a command it builds or launches a VM, that's fine. But building code from scratch, watching it compile, dealing with 1 off errors, or some hidden bug that now everyone is debugging, is usually painful to bear through.

Although not a "true" live coding demo in the normal sense, but this talk won't have nearly the same effect if done via video instead.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Yea I remember that one, it is a great example and awesome talk.

However as far as presenters go, this guy is a bit of an outlier. He is also a teacher, he offers some python mastery classes in Chicago, so he is more practiced at explaining and working through example code.

I came here to say exactly this and link to that talk. If you can't code live then don't, Beazley apparently can. Python lends itself to these kinds of talks because of its brevity.

I agree with you, but I'm probably biased because I've used live coding in one of my talks. However, the intent of coding live was similar to the talk you mentioned - it was to show people that what I was trying to accomplish isn't as hard as people think it is. In fact, it's easy enough that I can do it in an hour while explaining out loud what's happening.

Thanks for the video, looks interesting.

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