📡 Python radar - January/February 2024

A personal selection of Python-related news and projects that caught my attention this month (note: leading emojis are mine).

🔒 TIL: Forcing pip to use virtualenv (feldroy.com)
A useful "Today I Learned" for protecting yourself from accidentally installing packages in your system's Python installation (like when you forget to activate your virtual environment...).

📊 Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python (hakibenita.com)
The author presents 6 tools/packages for quickly importing data from an Excel file... and in the end, Rust wins!

🌐 Microdot: Yet Another Python Web Framework (miguelgrinberg.com)
A micro web framework with an API similar to Flask that runs on MicroPython, the implementation of Python for small devices/IoT.

🧮 NumPy 2 is coming: preventing breakage, updating your code (pythonspeed.com)
The arrival of NumPy 2 brings its own compatibility issues with the previous major version; this article provides tips to anticipate and prevent potential breakage.

⚖️ Pint: makes units easy (pint.readthedocs.io)
A library to simplify the manipulation of physical quantities and their units (conversion, systems of units), with integration into NumPy and Pandas.

⚡ Introduction to Polars (pbpython.com)
Here’s a quick overview of the main features of polars, a DataFrame manipulation library written in Rust that positions itself as a competitor to Pandas (there's a noticeable pattern emerging in the Python ecosystem with Rust...).

📝 GitHub - marimo-team/marimo: A reactive notebook for Python (github.com)
A new interactive Python notebook tool that aims to be "reactive," maintaining consistent state across all cells (change a cell somewhere, and all dependent cells update!), which can be easily deployed as an app and is recorded as a Python script.

🦀 uv: Python packaging in Rust (astral.sh)
And here’s the big news from the past few weeks, a replacement for pip (and pip-tools) that's extremely fast, written in Rust (!) by the same people who designed the linting and formatting tool ruff that has taken the community by storm. There has been some commotion about this news (little communication beforehand, a startup backed by venture capital), but it must be acknowledged that they are impressive... and this is not the end...

🛠️ Rye Grows With UV (lucumr.pocoo.org)
...because Astral, the company behind ruff and uv, takes under its wing the experimental project Rye developed by the author of this post (and creator of Flask/Jinja2/Click, a notable figure as well) with the vision of making it a "cargo for Python". The RustaCEAns here will understand very well what this means: a unique tool for managing Python development: handling Python versions, dependencies, environments, builds and publications, automatic formatting, and code linting—all in one tool: The One! (yes, there is a well-known XKCD about this problem in Python!)