PyCon, as an organization, takes it very seriously if someone expresses what they feel is a code of conduct violation. They didn't "side" with either party, they arbitrated a discussion between the 3 of them. They would have done that no matter the gender of the reporting and reportee sides, I am quite confident. I say this because I know the organizers fairly well.

That said, one evening I said something fairly similar to one of the organizers and another community member: "I just wish we could all act like adults". The one guy said "I hear you, but I can cite several papers on why we can't just do that." And with this guy, I have no doubt that he literally could. His theory (which I buy because he's much smarter than me :-) is that PyCon will have a couple more years of an "awkward phase" where we don't quite have enough diversity that various groups can stand more on equal footing. Once we reach that point, he speculates, things like this will be less of an issue.

The primary reason to use iostreams is polymorphism -- something stdio does not support. And if you find iostreams slow, it is likely because you have not explored it much beyond cin/cout. Providing a reasonably sized buffer puts it on par with stdio performance. It is certainly not without it's faults. But with the Boost Format library, formatting no longer completely sucks. At least with iostreams I don't see random core dumps when someone changes a variable type and forgets to change the corresponding format character. The main reason to shun stdio is that it is a constant source of buffer overflows and stack-smashing attacks. It requires way too much effort to use securely. A couple innocent maintenance changes years after the original code was written can results in a remote exploit. No thanks.

I'll admit, I have done some soul searching since I heard about donglegate about whether I would attend PyCon 2014. I hear other responses saying things like "If I were a python dev, I would ...", so let me be clear here: I have commit privs to Python core (though I don't exercise them as much as I'd like), I'm involved in the conference (again, not as much as I'd like). I say this to make it clear that when I say I was seriously considering not going to 2014, it's somewhat of a big deal. I'm involved, however this is in no way an official statement from PyCon, these are my thoughts and my thoughts alone.

But here's the thing... Not going doesn't really send a message to the conference organizers, or at least it doesn't send the one you think it does. More on that in a moment. What it *DOES* send is a message to people who will take any opportunity to grandstand on their agenda, that they can find an audience at these conferences, to the extent that it goes on for multiple years. It doesn't matter whether the actions taken here were grandstanding or not. Irrespective of her intentions, many people are seeing it as such, so I think it's fair to say it can send a message to others who would, without speculating on the intentions that started this.

If conference attendance were way down next year, the story would be about how donglegate caused it, and it would be feeding all the horrific sentiments behind this. If, however, attendance is up next year, the story will be how despite this the Python community remained strong, shutting down the bad sentiments and making it into a positive story.

Unfortunately, I and a number of folks are expecting attendance to be down next year, before any of this donglegate stuff came out. PyCon tends to lose attendees every time it moves cities -- though moving to Santa Clara didn't suffer from that. Moving it such that a significant number of Americans need passports, who haven't in the past, may reduce attendance. On the other hand, there may be people who come from around the world who didn't want to deal with the TSA... It's all speculation, but an informal poll I took showed about half the people were expecting it to be smaller.

So why doesn't it send a useful message to the organizers? Because the conference organizers did all they could about this incident. When the incident was reported, they acted swiftly (by all accounts), spoke to the 3 involved, apologies were given and apparently accepted, and everyone went away happy. No complaints were filed about the posting of the photograph.

Everything that happened that is making this show up on slashdot happened *OUTSIDE THE CONFERENCE*. The incident itself happened, I believe, in the last hour of the conference (her blog post sounds like it happened during the closing Lightning Talks, the last session of the conference). But in any case, the firing and rage happened largely on the Internet, in response to her post of that picture.

What can the conference do? Ban any of them from the show in future years? The only official complaint to the conference was handled to the satisfaction of all involved, at the time. Excluding someone from the conference without any complaint would lead to another storm...

As I said in the subject, PyCon is a wonderful thing. I've been to 10 of them, I've only missed one. PyCon has been working hard to include more diversity, and this year we had around 20% women. I remember when we literally had a hand-full of women at PyCon, and I was married to one of them. In order to get here PyCon has had to do a lot of outreach and take reports of harassment and the like very seriously. The community is stronger for it. And we now have experience dealing with someone tweeting "shame photos"...

Retaliating against the conference for this is going to do more harm than good. Plain and simple.

Am I going to PyCon 2014? Absolutely!

The guys were *NOT* kicked out. None of the three were kicked out. According to the official statement and my personal conversations with other conference organizers:

"Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied."

http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappropriate.html

Here's hoping that arrays and pointers end up near the end of the book. I've seen more CS students completely hosed by profs teaching pointers, char[] and other arrays in Chapter 1, along with having them design linked lists, bubble sorts and such in their first few weeks of learning to program and their intro to C++. Teach <iostream>, <string>, <vector>, <map>, <algorithm>, etc. While doing that, teach about control structures: if, while, for, switch, and so on. Teach exceptions from the start. Then teach (properly) OO and inheritance. Drill the Liskov substitution principle into their heads when doing this. Explain about static vs. dynamic polymorphism. Then teach about pointers, arrays, data structures and algorithms. Start at the high-level and then drill down to the important stuff. Make sure that they see how fast and efficient <algorithm> is and ensure that they compare their algorithmic efficiency to what is in the standard library. I don't want to find another bubble sort or linked list implementation in production C++ code ever again.

If you want an indication of the sad state that C++ education is in, hang out on a C++ beginner forum for a while. Many schools are still teaching using pre-C++98 tools -- using Borland compilers from the early '90s. Why do that when there are really good, modern, free C++ compilers available?

I defiantly clean out all of my electronics, voiding warranties left and right.

Get off my lawn! Grow up and get a job, you over-privileged, crack-addled kids.

I was not being a smart-ass. Google "aluminum lubricant obesity". Nothing of value is returned. I know about BPA. It is not used as a lubricant in "machines that make aluminum soda cans" [sic]. There is no way to for anyone to know just how confused you are and the severity of the misinformation you are spreading without some sort of citation. Now we know.

Citation needed.

The force is strong in this one. He didn't fall for the Jedi mind trick of "false dichotomy".

What is the purpose of national borders if not to protect a nation's citizenry and economy? It seems the groups lobbying for lowering trade and immigration restrictions are those that operate above the level of national boundaries. These organizations have no national allegiance. Their goals are not necessarily in the best long-term interest of the nation. The long-term interests of the nation are not a factor for them.

Really? Do you think that the IPs have not been spoofed? The hard part is tracking down the source of the attacks through all the various agents running on infected hosts -- and finding the sources that do not originate from an IP. Besides, what is the point of doing that? What do you think is the strategic goal of such a scenario?

Most terrorists are human.