This past Tuesday I gave my import talk to VanPyZ, my local Python user's group. Turns out it was not only long, I had details in there that were not what people cared about (specifically covering the details of choosing what module to have __import__ return). I also realized that explaining import in text was not as clear as I thought it was (problem of having been neck deep in this stuff for so long).
And so, thanks to my supervisor paying for a copy of OmniGraffle Pro, I have been reworked my presentation using flowcharts. I think the charts make the presentation much easier to follow as now you can visually follow the various cases that must be dealt with instead of reading some pseudocode or me trying to explain things through bullet points.
A side-effect of doing multiple flowcharts on import for my presentation is that I wanted to make a single, comprehensive flowchart of what import does. That flowchart, along with the master graffle file, is in svn. As I said on Jaiku, the algorithm doesn't look complicated when drawn as a flowchart, but boy is it long!
I will probably eventually finish the flowchart to be comprehensive. As of right now it lacks the details of deciding what module to return. I also left out any details on how the source/bytecode importer/loader works and I would like to get that drawn as well.
And in PyCon news, it looks like there will be 1029 attendees at PyCon if everyone who still needs to pay does. Possibly over a thousand attendees! We had over 600 last year. The growth is just phenomenal. I still remember the first PyCon when it was about 200 attendees and we had A/C issues with all the rooms. Now we have sponsored sprints, a keynote each day, and paid lunches. The conference has come a long way.
